of his own personality Nietzsche may have thought not wisely but too well; but in this regard it appears that he did not exaggerate himself. "After Luther and Goethe," he wrote to Rohde, "a third step remained to be taken.... I have the idea that with _Zarathustra_ I have brought the German language to its point of perfection." The German world of letters has not said No! to a claim so proud as to seem mere vanity. Friedrich Nietzsche holds a safe, and even a supreme position in the history of literature. What is to be said of his place in the history of philosophy? Höffding allows him a high "symptomatic value," but only that. His work has the merit of a drama, in which the contradictions of modern thought, vibrant with passion, clash and crash together in a tumultuous conflict which, unhappily, has no issue. M. Alfred Fouillée, who has contrasted him with Guyau--that noblest of "modern" thinkers--in his book _Nietzsche et l'immoralisme,_ draws out a table of antitheses, and cancelling denials against affirmations, arrives at a result that looks remarkably like zero. Nietzsche in truth was a man of ecstasies and intuitions, rather than of consequent thought. He troubled little to purge himself of self-contradictions, as became a writer whose first word had been a vehement assault on that Socratic rationalism which, as he believed, had withered up the vital abundance of Greece. His instincts were those of an oracle, a mystagogue; and mystagogues do not argue. Heinrich von Stein, in styling his first book an _Essay in Lyrical Philosophy,_ spoke in terms of his master's mind.