the idea with its complex of consequences, the idea as a luminous whole, is what is referred to in the passage cited in the text.
f G. Chatterton-Hill quite misconceives Nietzsche's meaning in speaking of eternal life as wished for, "because only in eternity can the plentitude of its [life's] expansion be realized" (op. cit., p. 71).
g For example, by O. Külpe, Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Deutschland, pp. 61-2; Meyer, op. cit., p. 207; F. Rittelmeyer, Friedrich Nietzsche und die Religion, p. 67; A. Fouill6é, Revue Philosophique, LXVI (1909), p. 527.
h Nietzsche even has an early remark to the following effect: "The whole process of the world's history goes on as if free will and responsibility existed. We have here a necessary moral presupposition, a category of our action. That strict causality, which we can quite well grasp conceptually, is not a necessary category. The demands (Consequenz) of logic are inferior to the demands of the thinking which accompanies action" (Werke, IX, 188, § 129).
i See Meyer, op. cit., pp. 381 ff.; Simmel (with an apparently conclusive mathematical demonstration), op. cit., p. 250 n.; Richter (with a reference to Cantor's doctrine of the different powers of all quantities), op. cit., pp. 276, 326-7. Dorner, however, who, though not sympathetic, means to be just, and gives us, in general, criticism of Nietzsche worthy of the great theologian, appears to take a circular course of things for granted, in case there is a fixed and constant quantity of force (op. cit., p. 190).
j Vaihinger (Die Philosophie des Als Ob, p. 789 n), commenting on this remark, suggests that O. Ewald (Nietzsches Lehre in ihren Grundbegriffen) and Simmel may be right in thinking that Nietzsche held to "eternal return" as a "pedagogical, regulative idea," rather than dogmatically.
k See the letter to Rohde, July 15, 1882 (Briefe, II, 566). Cf. Lou Andreas-Salomé, op. cit., pp. 140-2, 224; Richter, op cit., pp. 64, 276; Drews, op. cit., p. 326; Ziegler, op. cit., p. 132.
l A. W. Benn, says that Nietzsche "plagiarized" the doctrine from the Stoics (The Greek Philosophers, 2d ed., p. 335 n.).
m It is singular that Nietzsche does not notice what would ordinarily be counted a defect in his view, namely, that no conscious continuity between this life and the next is asserted—we do not remember our previous existence and presumably in our future state shall have no recollection of this. The average man has little concern about a future individual, who, however like him, is not himself, i.e., a continuation of his present consciousness. I can only suggest that here too Nietzsche must have judged others by himself. To him, if the lives were identical, if there was an absolute repetition of the same thing, it was of small moment whether there was a thread of memory connecting them or not. That the same commonplace thing should be eternally repeating itself—this irrespective of anything else, was what depressed him, as it was the possibility of an eternal repetition of sublime things that lifted him up. For the moment he, as it were, became pure speculative intelligence, intent only to know whether anything going on in the universe was worth while.
CHAPTER XV
a It is sometimes said that the same stimulus, applied to different sense organs, gives rise to correspondingly different sensations—so H. Wildon Carr, Philosophical Review, May, 1914, p. 257.
b Cf. the early remark before quoted: "The sensation is not the
