One should only speak where one cannot remain silent, and only speak of what one has _conquered_—the rest is all chatter, “literature,” bad breeding. My writings speak only of my conquests, “I” am in them, with all that is hostile to me, _ego ipsissimus_, or, if a more haughty expression be permitted, _ego ipsissimum_. It may be guessed that I have many below me.... But first I always needed time, convalescence, distance, separation, before I felt the stirrings of a desire to flay, despoil, lay bare, “represent” (or whatever one likes to call it) for the additional knowledge of the world, something that I had lived through and outlived, something done or suffered. Hence all my writings,—with one exception, important, it is true,—must be _ante-dated_—they always tell of a “behind-me.” Some even, like the first three _Thoughts out of Season_, must be thrown back before the period of creation and experience of a previously published book (_The Birth of Tragedy_ in the case cited, as any one with subtle powers of observation and comparison could not fail to perceive). That wrathful outburst against the Germanism, smugness, and raggedness of speech of old David Strauss, the contents of the first _Thought out of Season_, gave a vent to feelings that had inspired me long before, as a student, in the midst of German culture and cultured Philistinism (I claim the paternity of the now much used and misused phrase “cultured Philistinism”). What I said against the “historical disease” I said as one who had slowly and laboriously recovered from that disease, and who was not at all disposed to renounce “history” in the future because he had suffered from her in the past. When in the third _Thought out of Season_ I gave expression to my reverence for my first and only teacher, the _great_ Arthur Schopenhauer—I should now give it a far more personal and emphatic voice—I was for my part already in the throes of moral scepticism and dissolution, that is, as much concerned with the criticism as with the study of all pessimism down to the present day. I already did not believe in “a blessed thing,” as the people say, not even in Schopenhauer. It was at this very period that an unpublished essay of mine, “On Truth and Falsehood in an Extra-Moral Sense,” came into being. Even my ceremonial oration in honour of Richard Wagner, on the occasion of his triumphal celebration at Bayreuth in 1876—Bayreuth signifies the greatest triumph that an artist has ever won—a work that bears the strongest stamp of “individuality,” was in the background an act of homage and gratitude to a bit of the past in me, to the fairest but most perilous calm of my sea-voyage ... and as a matter of fact a severance and a farewell. (Was Richard Wagner mistaken on this point? I do not think so. So long as we still love, we do not paint such pictures, we do not yet “examine,” we do not place ourselves so far away as is essential for one