To express finally in a single formula my opposition to the romantic pessimism of the abstinent, the unfortunate, the conquered: there is a will to the tragic and to pessimism, which is a sign as much of the severity as of the strength of the intellect (taste, emotion, conscience). With this will in our hearts we do not fear, but we investigate ourselves the terrible and the problematical elements characteristic of all existence. Behind such a will stand courage and pride and the desire for a really great enemy. That was _my_ pessimistic outlook from the first—a new outlook, methinks, an outlook that even at this day is new and strange? To this moment I hold to it firmly and (if it will be believed) not only _for_ myself but occasionally _against_ myself.... You would prefer to have that proved first? Well, what else does all this long preface—prove? SILS-MARIA, UPPER ENGADINE, _September, 1886_. PART I. MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 1. TO THE DISILLUSIONED IN PHILOSOPHY.—If you hitherto believed in the highest value of life and now find yourselves disillusioned, must you immediately get rid of life at the lowest possible price? 2. OVERNICE.—One can even become overnice as regards the clearness of concepts. How disgusted one is then at having truck with the half-clear, the hazy, the aspiring, the doubting! How ridiculous and yet not mirth-provoking is their eternal fluttering and straining without ever being able to fly or to grasp! 3. THE WOOERS OF REALITY.—He who realises at last how long and how thoroughly he has been befooled, embraces out of spite even the ugliest reality. So that in the long run of the world’s history the best men have always been wooers of reality, for the best have always been longest and most thoroughly deceived. 4. ADVANCE OF FREETHINKING.—The difference between past and present freethinking cannot better be characterised than by that aphorism for the recognition and expression of which all the fearlessness of the eighteenth century was needed, and which even then, if measured by our modern view, sinks into an unconscious naïveté. I mean Voltaire’s aphorism, “croyez-moi, mon ami, l’erreur aussi a son mérite.” 5.