A magnificent dialectician, Nietzsche threw overboard all metaphysical baggage. He despised the jargon of Schoolman and modern philosophers. For him Hegel was a verbalistic bat, blind to the realities of life; and it is just at this point that the influence of the insurgent has been so provocative of good. He has overturned the barriers of a repulsive metaphysical terminology and dared to be naked and natural, though a philosopher. He erected no system, no vast, polyphonic edifice with winding staircase and darkened chambers. Nietzsche made no philosophical formula; rather, his formula is an image, the image of a lithe dancer. The writer of this résumé pretends to see the beginnings of Nietzsche’s philosophy, or poetry, in the second part of Faust. When Euphorion, that child of Helena and Faust, of Beauty and Intellect, the merging of the Classical and Romantic, sings:— Let me be skipping, Let me be leaping, To soar and circle Through ether sweeping, Is now the passion That me hath won, he but set the pace for Nietzsche, the Dancing Philosopher. Dancing blithely over a tight rope stretched between two eternities, the Past and the Future, Man, gay, and unafraid, views the depths of Time and Space. It is “Man who is a rope connecting animal and Beyond Man” (Übermensch). “He is a bridge, not a goal; a transition and a destruction.” These seemingly startling statements, which may be found in Thus spake Zarathustra, are, after all, nothing new; Christianity, with its angels and Darwinism, with its bold hints at future evolutions and developments, do but say the same things, each in its own way. But Nietzsche, like his beloved Euphorion, must needs graze the rim of the sun in his flight, and Icarus-wise come tumbling to earth—and a Weimar retreat. The Titanism of Nietzsche, might over right, power over weakness, impels him to hate all weakness, and Christianity, he declares, is a weakness, a degenerate sort of Judaism, complicated with the teachings of Greek mystagogues. He says that the first and only Christian was nailed to the cross, and this should please the heart of Tolstoy. Bolder still is Nietzsche’s wish that a Dostoïevsky might have depicted the Christ in all his childlike innocence and Godlike love. Nietzsche worships force and hates slave-morality, _i.e._ all modern religions, in which pity for the weak is basic. To him the symbol of the crucifix is degrading, a symbol of degenerating races. A very Spartan, he would have the great blond barbarian once more trample, Attila-like, the blood-stained soil of Europe and Asia, sparing none. _Væ Victis!_ “What is best belongeth to my folk and myself. And if it is not given to us, we take it, the best food, the purest sky, the strongest thoughts, the most beautiful women.” Thus spake Zarathustra, and the voice is Nietzsche’s, but the hands are the hands of Esau—Bismarck: Blood and Iron!