"To what extent I had just thereby found the concept 'tragic,' the definitive perception of the psychology of tragedy, I have but lately stated in the _Twilight of the Idols,_ page 139 (1st edit.): 'The affirmation of life, even in its most unfamiliar and severe problems, the will to life, enjoying its own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice of its highest types,--_that_ is what I called Dionysian, that is what I divined as the bridge to a psychology of the _tragic_ poet. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion by its vehement discharge (it was thus that Aristotle misunderstood it); but, beyond terror and pity, _to realise in fact_ the eternal delight of becoming, that delight which even involves in itself the _joy of annihilating!_[1] In this sense I have the right to understand myself to be the first _tragic philosopher_--that is, the utmost antithesis and antipode to a pessimistic philosopher. Prior to myself there is no such translation of the Dionysian into the philosophic pathos: there lacks the _tragic wisdom,_--I have sought in vain for an indication thereof even among the _great_ Greeks of philosophy, the thinkers of the two centuries _before_ Socrates. A doubt still possessed me as touching _Heraclitus,_ in whose proximity I in general begin to feel warmer and better than anywhere else. The affirmation of transiency _and annihilation,_ to wit the decisive factor in a Dionysian _philosophy,_ the yea-saying to antithesis and war, to _becoming,_ with radical rejection even of the concept '_being,_'--that I must directly acknowledge as, of all thinking hitherto, the nearest to my own. The doctrine of 'eternal recurrence,' that is, of the unconditioned and infinitely repeated cycle of all things--this doctrine of Zarathustra's _might_ after all have been already taught by Heraclitus. At any rate the portico[2] which inherited well-nigh all its fundamental conceptions from Heraclitus, shows traces thereof." [Illustration: _Facsimile of Nietzsches handwriting._] 4.