To be sure, our era is not arbitrarily made, not excogitated and invented by man. To be sure, great elementary forces of life will come, must come, to their unfolding in these movements. To be sure, the matter of real concern is a new structure of humanity, new cultural and social forms, new world-views, new life-views. No doubt these forces of life will carry the individual along with them, will come upon him and coerce him when he does not so will, will not at all even ask him what he wills, what he has to say to them, or how he regards them. But on this very account, in surveying the great whole of our life development we easily lose sense for what is individual and special. Where classes and masses of men encounter each other, where world-moving thought jolt and undermine thousand-year-old traditions and customs, removing their very foundations, there the individual human soul suffers abridgement, there we forget that even the largest number consists of units, and that the greatest numerical worth is judged according to the worth of these units. Therefore a great social thinker must reflect ever anew that _man_ is the significant thing in every new social culture--is beginning and goal. To understand how to trumpet a word respecting _man and his personality_ into this social movement and seething, this is to do an essential service to the modern way of viewing life, this is to warn us that we are not entirely impersonal in the presence of pure objectivity. No one has done such service to our age in so signal a manner, as _Friedrich Nietzsche_. He is not the preacher of _social_, but of _personal_, man. However, fundamental hater of socialism that he was, he yet became a mighty moving and impelling force for socialism. He, too, wills a new culture, _but he wills it through a new man_. Therefore, he shows us the way to this new culture in that which is most _personal_ to man, in man's _Longing_, or yearning, or craving,--in man's _Sehnsucht_,--a word of profound import to which none of these English words does justice.