complete idealist and gives up the idea of extra-mental reality altogether. The depressing influence of Kant's criticism was felt to the full by Heinrich von Kleist—Nietzsche quotes a moving passage from him.[1] He himself, however, escaped it by the help of Schopenhauer. Ultimate reality proved, indeed, to be very different from what he had been brought up to believe, but he could at least make out its outline, could see his own place in the general framework and find a meaning for his life. To quote the substance of his language, Schopenhauer was a guide to lead him from skeptical depression and criticising renunciation up to the heights of the tragic view, with the heavens and unnumbered stars overhead; once more he obtained the sense of life as a whole and learned where consolation was to be found for one's individual limitations and pain, namely, in sacrificing egoism and surrendering oneself to noble aims, above all those of justice and pity.[2]
I need not here repeat the fundamental propositions of Schopenhauer's metaphysics which Nietzsche adopted. c The reality lying back of the world of sensations, and also of ourselves (to the extent we are distinguishable from sensations), is will—one will, indeed, since space and time, the conditions of multiplicity, are regarded as subjective forms. d The will simply appears in many objects, simply appears in the form of many wills—change, alternate life and death, the general evanescence of things are all but appearance. The view had so far a consoling and elevating effect on Nietzsche: as against the whole realm of the transitory and fugitive, he was able to assert an abiding, eternal energy that was real. e But how, it may be asked, under ultimate conditions such as these do appearances ever arise? How does it come to pass that the Primal Unity (das Ur-Eine) gives birth to them? At this point Nietzsche is speculative and venturesome even beyond his master, who had only spoken vaguely of a fall (Abfall), and developes a view which stands in marked contrast to theistic, or at least Christian, metaphysics. He premises that the Primal Will, like its human counterpart, of which it is indeed only the inmost essence, is a striving will, that is, something unsatisfied, something that suffers. The dis-
