The Nietzsche philosophical pedigree is not difficult to trace. He comes intellectually from Max Stirner—especially Stirner—Bakounine, the anarchist, and Karl Gutzkow. As mad a Schopenhauerian as Richard Wagner, he threw over his allegiance to the Master Pessimist when he discovered that there can be no will to live without previous existence, and existence presupposes will. It is the _Will to Power_ that is Nietzsche’s cardinal doctrine, and this will to power is neither evil nor good, for our Siegfried among philosophers would transvalue all moral values. In his divagations with a hammer—he called himself the Philosopher with a Hammer—smashed all idols, old, new, and to come. He likewise, in his intellectual fury and craving after universal knowledge, smashed the exceeding delicate mechanism of his own brain. Boasting of Polish blood, he, like Poland, represented a disintegrated individualism. Nietzsky was said to be the ancestral name, and with it was inherited all the pride of his nationality. He loathed the common herd more than Horace, more than Flaubert—to whom life was but a bad smell. Herbert Spencer’s philosophical moderation, the tepid piety of the middle classes, he equally scorned. He would have us all aristocrats in mind and body, and Wagner’s snobbery—so necessary to his worldly advancement—filled Nietzsche with disgust. No king, no pope, no democracy, could bind his rebellious intellect. Like Ibsen’s Brand he sought ever the steepest heights. A lonely soul is Zarathustra—Nietzsche, and one of the most saddening scenes in Also sprach Zarathustra (begun in 1883, finished in 1885, but not published until 1892) is his finding of the animals, the pope and Wagner worshipping the Jackass according to the ritual of the Roman Catholic church. It was Wagner’s Parsifal that stung him to madness. The anti-naturalism, the mysticism, the attempted revival in theatric form of—to him—hierarchical superstitions and various abnormalities, shocked the soul of Nietzsche. In his wonderful prose epic, Wagner appears masked as the Wizard, the prophet of pity, of redemption of all the formulas hated by this extraordinary thinker. It is mere childishness, or else bigotry, to point at Nietzsche’s end as the moral tag of his life. If he had lived during the Middle Ages, either he would have been burnt alive or else have proved a formidable rival to some angelic doctor. But living in the nineteenth century, a century of indifference to men of his ardent temperament, he erected his own stake and fagots and the mad genius within him burnt up his mind. While he would not have so astonished the world if born to work in the dogmatic harness of the Roman Catholic church, yet its discipline might have quieted his throbbing nerves, and perhaps given the faith a second Rosmini.