The reading of his books, unless it be impatient, careless, and unworthy, is a process of discovering what were those half-dozen ideas that separated Nietzsche from the thinkers of his time, stimulated his brain until at last it broke, and during many years kept him in the lonely joyful ecstasy of continual exploration. “The first adherents of a creed do not prove anything against it,” but they often so obscure it as to postpone its eventual utility. Some of the half-dozen ideas I have mentioned have been so often caricatured that it is extremely difficult to recognise them without the exaggeration with which we have been made familiar. It is not easy to state another man’s ideas. To fail is to do him an injury. To succeed is not unlike taking the words out of his mouth, which is rude. But I am neither a translator of Nietzsche nor an opponent. I wish to understand, not to persuade. And, for understanding, such statement is desirable. Nietzsche neither escapes nor attempts to escape the contradictions in the form of thought that make logic and life battledores to toss laughter at each other like a shuttlecock. He is a determinist and yet gives advice, the giving of which presupposes a belief in free will and a possible choice. He seeks to influence others, and, in his manner at least, forgets that the logical determinist should only allow himself to say: “Circumstances compel me to make certain statements, which, in the form of circumstances, may or may not share in the sum of circumstances that compel you to actions and thoughts which in their totality I cannot conceive.” That is not the view of his own activity which dictates the eager vivid combination of argument and incantation that makes Nietzsche’s books. He is free, in that he has the illusion of freedom. The illusion of freedom is one of the determining circumstances. Its effect is to make it unnecessary to remember in practice that circumstances determine. We need not therefore hesitate over the inconsistency apparent between some of Nietzsche’s ideas. We do better to notice it as characteristic of his thought, and simply to state his ideas, remembering, if we will, that they belong to different circles of consciousness; some to that wider circle that includes the universe and with it determinism, and some to that smaller circle, concentric with the first, and including only the area of practical activity. Let us be determinists first and examine the Nietzschean universe. The idea of Eternal Recurrence seems to have had for Nietzsche something of the hypnotic character of those ideas that made Poe write of his _Eureka_: “What I here propound is true: therefore it cannot die;--or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will ‘rise again to the Life Everlasting.’” Indeed the idea itself is not unlike that of Poe, who, untrained alike in philology and philosophy, expressed himself in a manner that would have given Nietzsche exquisite pain: