position of it."[1] Dr. Richard Beyer says, "His doctrine does not lack system but systematic presentation, which however also Socrates, a Leibnitz did not leave behind them."[2] Professor Vaihinger, who writes professedly not as a disciple, much less apostle of Nietzsche, but simply as an historian of philosophy, describes his book by saying, "I have brought the seemingly disorderly scattered fragments, the disjecta membra, into a strictly consistent system."[3] d Nietzsche himself, though ordinarily too much in his struggles to grasp them as a whole and see their final import, occasionally had a clear moment and looked as from a height upon the sum-total of his work. Writing from Turin to Brandes, 4th May, 1888, to the effect that his weeks there had turned out "better than any for years, above all more philosophic," he adds, "Almost every day for one or two hours I have reached such a point of energy that I could see as from an eminence my total conception—the immense variety of problems lying spread out before me in relief and clear outline. For this a maximum of force is needed, which I had hardly hoped for. Everything hangs together, for years everything has been going in the right direction; one builds his philosophy like a beaver—is necessary and does not know it."[4] He once expressed a wish that some one should make a kind of résumé of the results of his thinking,[5] evidently with the notion that there were results which might be put in orderly fashion. Professor Richter describes his own book—the most valuable one on the philosophical side which has been written on Nietzsche—as a modest attempt to fulfil that wish.[6] But why argue or quote? Any one who cares to read on in these pages will be able to judge for himself whether and how far Nietzsche was a philosopher—no one imagines that he was one in the sense that Kant and Aristotle were.
III
I have spoken of Nietzsche's changes. He is strongly contrasted in this respect with his master Schopenhauer, whose
