not let it tyrannize over us, since if we do, truth will some day leave us, declaring "thou liar from the beginning, what have I to do with thee?"[1]
His strictly independent career now begins. Up to this time, he has been largely under the shadow of Schopenhauer and Wagner. Though never their slave, he now first stands quite on his own feet. c We find interesting general remarks on education, in which he puts what we receive from others in a secondary place. The young man, he notes, impatient of results, takes his picture of men and things ready-made from some philosopher or poet—he learns much thereby, but not a great deal about himself. So far as he is to be a thinker, however, he must educate himself. The process of education at others' hands is either an experiment on something unknown, or else a kind of leveling to bring the new being into harmony with prevailing habits and customs; in either case it is a task that does not belong to a thinker, but to parents and teachers, whom some one with audacious honesty has called nos ennemis naturels. It is only after one has been "educated" the longest while, that one discovers oneself—and then a thinker may well be helpful, not as a teacher, but as one who has taught himself and has experience.[2] Nietzsche even raises the question whether in this age of books teachers of the ordinary sort are not almost dispensable.[3] As few persons as possible, he exclaims between productive minds and those hungry and ready to receive! Let us look on the teacher as at best a necessary evil, like the tradesman—an evil to be reduced to its smallest possible proportions![4] Views like these, half jest, half earnest, are the reflection of his personal experience. It is not that he quite turns his back on his former teachers—after he has once found himself, he thinks there had been no harm in being among the enthusiasts and living in their equatorial zone for a while: he had in this way taken a step towards that cosmopolitanism of mind which without presumption might say, "Nothing belonging to the mind is any longer foreign to me."[5] The very extremes of a man, he feels, may further the truth—now we
