Heraclitus, has traces of it.[1] l Something like it appears in Hölderlin's "Empedokles," in Heine's Voyage de Munich à Génes, in Blanqui's Éternité par les Astres—and, to speak of more strictly scientific or philosophical writers, in Julius Bahnsen's Zur Philosophie der Geschichte, in Guyau's Vers d'un Philosophe, in von Nägeli's address before the Congress of German Naturalists in Munich, 1878, in Gustave Le Bon's L'Homme et les Sociétés.[2] Professor Meyer even refers to Nietzsche's old enemy, von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, as having expressed belief in similar "cosmic periods" (in a lecture, "Weltperioden"),[3] and Professor Saintsbury would turn the idea into ridicule by calling it "only an echo of the carpenter in 'Peter Simple.'"[4] Nietzsche had early referred to the Pythagorean view (that under the same constellation of the heavenly bodies, the same things would happen on earth), but he thought that it savored of astrology and did not take it seriously."[5] The basis for the charge of error against him is a certain passage in Zarathustra—at least I can find nothing beyond this. In this passage the animals who attend the prophet, and are joyfully welcoming him back to life after an illness, divine the meaning of the illness and exclaim, "Sing and bubble over, O Zarathustra, heal thy soul with new songs, that thou mayest endure thy destiny, which was that of no one yet. For thy animals know well, O Zarathustra, who thou art and must become: behold, thou art the teacher of eternal recurrence—that is now thy destiny! That thou must be the first to teach this doctrine—how should this great destiny not be also thy greatest danger and illness!"[6] The natural interpretation here is that Zarathustra is to be the first of a line to proclaim the doctrine, with then the dangers and risks of an initiator—the thought is rather of the future, than of exclusion in relation to the past. But if "first" is taken otherwise and implies what the critics assume, the question is, whether in the form in which Nietzsche taught the doctrine, it is not new. For
