Would that we might forget, for a moment at least, all that partisan praise and blame have scraped together respecting this most modern of all philosophers; would that we might accompany him into the most hidden workshop of his own thoughts and hearken to the personal confessions of his wonderful soul! And what would we hear there? This preacher of crash and catastrophe and cataclysm, temporal and eternal, speaking of “thoughts which come with dove’s feet and steer and pilot the world”; of “the stillest hours which bring the storm.” Zarathustra-Nietzsche hears the _Höllenlärm_, the hellish alarum, that men make in life, that life itself makes; he observes how men lend their ears to this noise, how they are frightened by it, or exult over it, how they think that the truth is the truer where the noise is the louder, how the howling of the storm signifies to men that something good and great must be taking place, some great event of history must be under way. Then Nietzsche sets himself like a flint against this evaluation of things: “The greatest experiences, these are not our noisiest, but our stillest hours. It is not around the inventor of new noise, it is around the inventor of new values that the world revolves, inaudibly revolves.” I speak for myself alone, but these are words, Nietzsche words, for which I would gladly sacrifice whole volumes of moral and theological works. These words sharpen the eye and the ear for life-values which the majority of men today pass by—pass by more heedlessly perhaps than ever. These great words supply us with a criterion for the evaluation of questions of the moral life, a criterion that no one will cast aside who once comes to see what it means. It is a criterion without which we do not yet comprehend life in its depths, because we so constantly contemplate things from a false angle of vision. Something of the men who are carried away by “hellish alarum” lives in all of us. Let there be stillness without, and we think that there is nothing going on. Let nature peal and groan outside there, so that all gigantic forces seem to be released; then we have respect for her, we discern in such over-power even a divine creative force or a divine destructive will. Let people collide, the earth quake from thunder of cannon, and we signalize such a day in our history, pass it down from child to child, and we call such and such a battle a world-historical event. But we forget the best. A blustering and brewing pervades nature when Spring comes over the land to conquer Winter. When we hear the conflict we cry: “Spring has come!” Not so. The true, genuine Spring-life, nascent underneath the fury, makes no noise at all, weaves away inaudibly, invisibly, in tiny seeds, and conceals in itself the noiseless new germs of life.