Poor Nietzsche! what a bundle of contradictions! None of these contradictions are inexplicable. All of them are quite natural. They are the inevitable reactions against a prior enthusiasm, and he swings, according to the law of the pendulum, to the opposite extreme of his former position. How did Nietzsche develop into an unmoralist? Simply by way of reaction against the influence of Schopenhauer in combination with the traditional Christianity. Nietzsche passed through three periods in his development. He was first a follower of Schopenhauer and an admirer of Wagner, but he shattered his idols and became a convert to Auguste Comte's positivism. Schopenhauer was the master at whose feet Nietzsche sat; from him he learned boldness of thought and atheism, that this world is a world of misery and struggle. He accepted for a time Schopenhauer's pessimism but rebelled in his inmost soul against the ethical doctrine of the negation of the will. He retained Schopenhauer's contempt for previous philosophers (presumably he never tried to understand them) yet he resented the thought of a negation of life and replaced it by a most emphatic assertion. He thus recognized the reactionary spirit of Schopenhauer, whose system is a Christian metaphysics. Nietzsche denounces the ethics of a negation of the will as a disease, and since nature in the old system is regarded as the source of moral evil the idea dawns on him that he himself, trying to establish a philosophy of nature, is an immoralist. He now questions morality itself from the standpoint of an affirmation of the will, and at last goes so far as to speak of ideals as a symptom of shallowness.[8] [Illustration: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AS PROFESSOR AT BASLE.] Nietzsche argued that our conception of truth and our ideal world is but a phantasmagoria, and the picture of the universe in our consciousness a distorted image of real life. Our pleasures and pains, too, are both transient and subjective. Accordingly it would be a gross mistake for us to exaggerate their importance. What does it matter if we endure a little more or less pain, or of what use are the pleasures in which we might indulge? The realities of life consist in power, and in our dominion over the forces that dominate life. Knowledge and truth are of no use unless they become subservient to this realistic desire for power. They are mere means to an end which is the superiority of the overman, the representative of Nietzsche's philosophy by whom the mass of mankind are to be enslaved. This view constitutes his third period, in which he wrote those works that are peculiarly characteristic of his own philosophy.