The transvaluation of all values which Nietzsche so confidently prophesied, will not take place, at least not in the sense that Nietzsche believed. There is no reason to doubt that in the future as in the past history will follow the old conservative line of development in which different people according to their different characters will adopt their own subjective standards, and nature, by a survival of the fittest will select those for preservation who are most in agreement with this real world in which we live, a world from which Nietzsche, according to the sickly condition of his constitution, was separated by a wide gulf. He thirsted for it in vain, and we believe that he had a wrong conception of the wealth of its possibilities and viewpoints. [1] So far as I know, these lines have never been translated before. INDIVIDUALISM Nietzsche is unquestionably a bold thinker, a Faust-like questioner, and a Titan among philosophers. He is a man who understands that the problem of all problems is the question, Is there an authority higher than myself? And having discarded belief in God, he finds no authority except pretensions. Nietzsche apparently is only familiar with the sanctions of morality and the criterion of good and evil as they are represented in the institutions and thoughts established by history, and seeing how frequently they serve as tools in the hands of the crafty for the oppression of the unsophisticated masses of the people, he discards them as utterly worthless. Hence his truly magnificent wrath, his disgust, his contempt for underling man, for the masses, this muddy stream of present mankind. If Nietzsche had dug deeper, he would have found that there is after all a deep significance in moral ideals, for there is an authority above the self by which the worth of the self must be measured. Truth is not a mere creature of the self, but is the comprehension of the immutable eternal laws of being which constitute the norm of existence. Our self, "that creating, willing, valuing 'I,' which (according to Nietzsche) is the measure and value of all things," is itself measured by that eternal norm of being, the existence of which Nietzsche does not recognize. What is true of Nietzsche applies in all fundamental questions also to his predecessor, Max Stirner. It applies to individualism in any form if carried to its consistent and most extreme consequences.