"An animal, when it is sick," he wrote to Baron von Seydlitz, in 1888, "slinks away to some dark cavern, and so, too, does the _bête philosophe_. I am alone--absurdly alone--and in my unflinching and toilsome struggle against all that men have hitherto held sacred and venerable, I have become a sort of dark cavern myself--something hidden and mysterious, which is not to be explored...." But the mood vanished as the words were penned, and the defiant dionysian roared his challenge at his foes. "It is not impossible," he said, "that I am the greatest philosopher of the century--perhaps even more than that! I may be the decisive and fateful link between two thousand centuries!"[1] Max Nordau[2] says that Nietzsche was crazy from birth, but the facts do not bear him out. It is much more reasonable to hold that the philosopher came into the world a sound and healthy animal, and that it remained for overstudy in his youth, over-work and over drugging later on, exposure on the battle field, functional disorders and constant and violent strife to undermine and eventually overthrow his intellect. But if we admit the indisputable fact that Nietzsche died a madman and the equally indisputable fact that his insanity was not sudden, but progressive, we by no means read him out of court as a thinker. A man's reasoning is to be judged, not by his physical condition, but by its own ingenuity and accuracy. If a raving maniac says that twice two make four, it is just as true as it would be if Pope Pius X or any other undoubtedly sane man were to maintain it. Judged in this way Nietzsche's philosophy is very far from insane. Later on we shall consider it as a workable system, and point out its apparent truths and apparent errors, but in no place (saving, perhaps, one) is his argument to be dismissed as the phantasm of a lunatic. Nietzsche's sister says that, in the practical affairs of life, the philosopher was absurdly impractical. He cared nothing for money and during the better part of his life had little need to do so. His mother, for a country pastor's widow, was well-to-do, and when he was twenty-five his professorship at Basel brought him 3,000 francs a year. At Basel, in the late sixties, 3,000 francs was the income of an independent, not to say opulent man. Nietzsche was a bachelor and lived very simply. It was only upon books and music and travel that he was extravagant. After two years' service at Basel, the university authorities raised his wage to 4,000 francs, and in 1879, when ill health forced him to resign, they gave him a pension of 3,000 francs a year. Besides that, he inherited 30,000 marks from one of his aunts, and so, altogether, he had an income of $900 or $1,000 a year--the sum which Herbert Spencer regarded, all his life, as an insurance of perfect tranquillity and happiness.