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even does not care to, it does not follow that he has not deep-going, more or less reasoned thoughts, and that these thoughts do not hang together. Nietzsche reflected on first principles in almost every department of human interest (except perhaps mathematics). Though his prime interest is man and morals, he knows that these subjects cannot be separated from broader and more ultimate ones, and we have his ideas on metaphysics and the general constitution of the world. Poets, "stylists," prophets do not commonly lead others to write about their theory of knowledge,^c do not frequently deal, even in aphorisms, with morality as a problem, with cause and effect, with first and last things. Undoubtedly Nietzsche appears inconsistent at times, perhaps is really so. Not only does he express strongly what he thinks at a given time and leaves it to us to reconcile it with what he says at other times, not only does he need for interpreter some one with a literary as well as scientific sense, but his views actually differ more or less from time to time, and even at the same time—and Professor Höffding is not quite without justification in suggesting that they might more properly have been put in the form of a drama or dialogue.^[1] Nietzsche himself, in speaking of his "philosophy," qualifies and says "philosophies," as we have just seen. And yet there is coherence to a certain extent in each period of his life, and at last there is so much that we might almost speak of a system. There is even a certain method in his changes—one might say, using Hegelian language, that there is first an affirmation, then a negation, and finally an affirmation which takes up the negation into itself. Indeed, the more closely I have attended to his mental history, the more I have become aware of continuing and constant points of view throughout—so much so that I fear I may be found to repeat myself unduly, taking him up period by period as I do.^[2] The testimony of others may be interesting in this connection. Professor René Berthelot remarks in the Grande Encyclopédie, though with particular to the works of the last period, "They are the expression of a perfectly coherent doctrine, although Nietzsche has never made a systematic ex-

1. Harald Höffding, Moderne Philosophen, pp. 141-2.
2. I heard of a German book on Nietzsche not long ago—I cannot now remember its title—which disregarded the division of his life into periods altogether.