[Illustration: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AS A VOLUNTEER IN THE GERMAN ARTILLERY, 1868.] Nietzsche denounces the German character, German institutions, and the German language, his mother-tongue, and is extremely unfair in his denunciations. He takes pleasure in the fact that _Deutsch_ (see Ulfila's Bible translation) originally means "pagans or heathen," and hopes that the dear German people will earn the honor of being called pagans. (_La Gaya Scienza_, p. 176.) A reaction against his patriotism set in immediately after the war, when he became acquainted with the brutality of some vulgar specimens of the victorious nation,--most of them non-combatants.[4] Nietzsche not only wrote in German and made the most involved constructions, but when the war broke out he asked his adopted country Switzerland, in which he had acquired citizenship after accepting a position as professor of classical languages at the University of Basel, for leave of absence to join the German army. In the Franco-Prussian war he might have had a chance to live up to his theories of struggle, but unfortunately the Swiss authorities did not allow him to join the army, and granted leave of absence only on condition that he would serve as a nurse. Such is the irony of fate. While Nietzsche stood up for a ruthless assertion of strength and for a suppression of sympathy which he denounced as a relic of the ethics of a negation of life, his own tender soul was so over-sensitive that his sister feels justified in tracing his disease back to the terrible impressions he received during the war. Nietzsche speaks of the king as "the dear father of the country."[5] If there was a flaw in Nietzsche's moral character, it was goody-goodyness; and his philosophy is a protest against the principles of his own nature. While boldly calling himself "the first unmoralist," justifying even license itself and defending the coarsest lust,[6] his own life might have earned him the name of sissy, and he shrank in disgust from moral filth wherever he met with it in practical life. Nietzsche denounced pessimism, and yet his philosophy was, as he himself confesses, the last consequence of pessimism. Hegel declared (says Nietzsche in _Morgenröthe_, p. 8), "Contradiction moves the world, all things are self-contradictory"; "we (adds Nietzsche) carry pessimism even into logic." He proposes to vivisect morality; "but (adds he) you cannot vivisect a thing without killing it." Thus his "unmoralism" is simply an expression of his earnestness to investigate the moral problem, and he expresses the result in the terse sentence; _Moral ist Nothlüge_ (_Menschliches_, p. 63.)