Nietzsche never investigated what his own self consisted of. He never analyzed his individuality. Other-wise he would have learned that he received the most valuable part of his being from others, and that the bundle of instincts which he called his sovereign self was nothing but the heirloom of the ages that preceded him. In spite of his repudiation of any debt to others, he was but the continuation of others. But he boldly carried his individualism, if not to its logical conclusions, yet to its moral applications. When speaking of the Order of Assassins of the times of the Crusades, he said with enthusiasm: "The highest secret of their leaders was, 'Nothing is true, everything is allowed!'" And Nietzsche adds: "That indeed, was liberty of spirit; that dismissed even the belief in truth." The philosopher of instinct even regards the adherence to truth as slavery and the proclamation of truth as dogmatism. [1] See Nietzsche's poems in the appendix to _A Genealogy of Morals_, Eng. ed., Macmillan, p. 248. THE OVERMAN He quintessence of Nietzsche's philosophy is the "overman." What is the overman? The word (_Uebermensch_) comes from a good mint; it is of Goethe's coinage, and he used it in the sense of an awe-inspiring being, almost in the sense of _Unmensch_, to characterize Faust, the titanic man of high aims and undaunted courage,--the man who would not be moved in the presence of hell and pursued his aspirations in spite of the forbidding countenance of God and the ugly grin of Satan. But the same expression was used in its proper sense about two and a half millenniums ago in ancient China, where at the time of Lao-tze the term _chiün jen_ [Chin. chars], "superior man," or _chiün tse_, "superior sage," was in common usage. But the overman or _chiün jen_ of Lao-tze, of Confucius and other Chinese sages is not a man of power, not a Napoleon, not an unprincipled tyrant, not a self-seeker of domineering will, not a man whose ego and its welfare is his sole and exclusive aim, but a Christlike figure, who puts his self behind and thus makes his self--a nobler and better self--come to the front, who does not retaliate, but returns good for evil,[1] a man (as the Greek sage describes him) who would rather suffer wrong than commit wrong.[2] This kind of higher man is the very opposite of Nietzsche's overman, and it is the spirit of this nobler conception of a higher humanity which furnishes the best ideas of all the religions of the world, of Lao-tze's Taoism, of Buddhism and of Christianity.