Never before had this question been put as Nietzsche put it. We should recall that Nietzsche was not one of those who had experienced the extremes of either plenty or want, nor was he one of those who filled the wide space between the two. To him, the pessimism of the discontented and the optimism of the fortunate and the satisfied were alike superficial, if not impertinent. It was not a question of "happiness" at all. In bitter, biting sarcasm he says, with reference to the English utilitarian "happiness morality": "I do not seek my happiness; only an Englishman seeks his happiness; I seek my _work_." No; his was a question which his conscience put to culture. Was it a "culture of the _earth_, or of _man_?" Here Nietzsche probes home. And he alone did it. The most diverse censors of our time had not seen and said that no matter how desirable, no matter how gloriously conceived the new order of things might be, _man_ must be the decisive thing; _man_ must tip the scales. It was this that went against the grain. Mightier machines, larger cities, better apartments, bigger schools, what was the good of it all, _et id omne genus_, if new and greater men did not arise? So said Nietzsche. And he said it with high scorn to a generation which had forgotten that man is not for "culture," but culture for man; of man, by man, for man. Every people seems to pass through a period in which it is obsessed with the idea that the causes of popular prosperity are at once motive and criterion of culture; that the natural laws of economics are the universally valid norms of the ebb and flow of human values; that a balance on the balance sheet to the good, the satisfactoriness of the statistics of exports and imports to the wishes of the interested parties, are an occasion for jubilation over the ascent which life has compassed. Harbor some scruple as to whether the jubilation be warranted or not, and you are at once pilloried as a pessimist and a malcontent. And yet had there been no Nietzsche there would still remain Cicero's warning: "Woe to a people whose wealth grows but whose men decay." But there was a Nietzsche, and he dared to call even his Fatherland Europe's "flat country"--flat was a hard word for a land that could once boast of so many poets and thinkers. But now the flatter the better! But now no peaks to scale, no yawning abysses on whose edges one grows dizzy! Nothing a single step removed from the ordinary, the conventional! Now heights and depths, distinctions and distances, these are valid in the world of quantity, not of quality; of possession, not of being; of tax tables, not of human essence and human power! Now all men are equal! But Nietzsche knew that if men are equal they are not free; if free they are not equal. With a fury and a fire that literally consumed him, he dedicated himself to the task of leading men up out of this flatness, away from this leveling--up to an appreciation of the potential--not the