Although the contents of "The Joyful Wisdom" are not inherently a part of Nietzsche's philosophy, but only detached applications of his theories--ideas which floated to the surface of his doctrines--the material encountered here is of wide and varied interest. There are criticisms of German and Southern culture; valuations of modern authors; views on the developments of art; theories of music; analyses of Schopenhauer and an explanation of his vogue; judgments of the ancient and the modern theatre; excursions into philological fields; arraignments of contemporary classicism; doctrines of creative artistry; personal paragraphs on mental culture, politics and commerce. ... The book is, in fact, more critical than philosophical. Nietzsche never entirely dissevered himself from his time and from the habits, both of thought and action, which characterised his contemporaries. From his first academic essays to his last transvaluation of values, he remained the patient and analytical observer of the life about him. For this reason it has been argued among disciples of "pure" thinking that he was not, in the strictest sense of the word, a "philosopher," but rather a critically intellectual force. This diagnosis might carry weight had not Nietzsche avowedly built his philosophical structure on a repudiation of abstract thinking. This misunderstanding of him arose from the adherents of rational thinking overlooking the fact that, where the older philosophers had detached themselves from reality because of the instability of natural hypotheses, Nietzsche re-established human bases on which he founded his syllogisms. Therefore one should not attempt to divorce the purely critical from the purely philosophical in his writings. Even in a book so frankly critical as "The Joyful Wisdom" there is a directing force of theoretical unity. This is especially true of the third section. This division is made up almost entirely of comments on men and affairs, short analyses of human attitudes, desultory excursions into the sociological, brief remarks on man's emotional nature, apothegms dealing with human attributes, bits of racy philosophical gossip, religious and scientific maxims, and the like. Sometimes these observations are cynical, sometimes gracious, sometimes bitter, sometimes buoyant, sometimes merely witty. But all of them are welded together by a profound conception of humanity.