NIENBURG ON THE SAALE, a town of Germany, in the duchy of Anhalt, situated at the influx of the Bode into the Saale, 6 m. N. of Bernburg on the railway Calbe-Könnern. Pop. (1905) 5748. It contains a beautiful Gothic Evangelical church, an old castle, once a monastery (founded 975, dissolved 1546), and now devoted to secular uses, and a classical school. The industries embrace iron-founding and machine-making, malting and tanning.
NIENBURG ON THE WESER, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of Hanover, situated on the Weser, 33 m. N.W. from Hanover by the railway to Bremen. Pop. (1905) 9638. It has an Evangelical and a Roman Catholic church, a classical school and an agricultural college. Its industries consist chiefly in glass-blowing, distilling, biscuit-making and the manufacture of manures. The town is mentioned as early as 1025. It was fortified in the 12th century, obtained municipal rights in 1569, and passed in 1582 to the house of Lüneburg. It was occupied by the imperialists from 1627 to 1634, and by the French during the Seven Years’ War. The walls were dismantled by order of Napoleon I. in 1807.
See Gade, Geschichte der Stadt Nienburg an der Weser (1862).
NIEPCE, JOSEPH NICÉPHORE (1765–1833), French physicist, and one of the inventors of photography, was born at Châlon-sur-Saône on the 7th of March 1765. In 1792 he entered the army as a sub-lieutenant, and in the following year he saw active service in Italy. Ill-health and failing eyesight compelled him to resign his commission before he had risen above the rank of lieutenant; but in 1795 he was nominated administrateur of the district of Nice, and he held the post until 1801. Returning in that year to his birthplace, he devoted himself along with his elder brother Claude (1763–1828) to mechanical and chemical researches; and in 1811 he directed his attention to the rising art of lithography. In 1813 the idea of obtaining sun pictures first suggested itself to him in this connexion; and in 1826 he learned that L. J. M. Daguerre was working in the same direction. In 1829 the two united their forces, “pour coopérer au perfectionnement de la découverte inventée par M. Niepce et perfectionnée par M. Daguerre” (see also Photography). Niepce died at Gras, his property near Châlon, on the 3rd of July 1833. A nephew, Claude Félix Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor (1805–1870), served with distinction in the army, and also made important contributions towards the advancement of the art of photography; he published Recherches photographiques (Paris, 1855) and Traité pratique de gravure héliographique sur acier et sur verre (Paris, 1866).
NIEREMBERG, JUAN EUSEBIO (1595–1658), Spanish Jesuit and mystic, was born at Madrid in 1595, joined the Society of Jesus in 1614, and subsequently became lecturer on Scripture at the Jesuit seminary in Madrid, where he died on the 7th of April 1658. He was highly esteemed in devout circles as the author of De la afición y amor de Jesús (1630), and De la afición y amor de María (1630), both of which were translated into Arabic, Flemish, French, German, Italian and Latin. These works, together with the Prodigios del amor divino (1641), are now forgotten, but Nieremberg’s version (1656) of the Imitation is still a favourite, and his eloquent treatise, De la hermosura de Dios y su amabilidad (1649), is the last classical manifestation of mysticism in Spanish literature. Nieremberg has not the enraptured vision of St Theresa, nor the philosophic significance of Luis de León, and the unvarying sweetness of his style is cloying; but he has exaltation, unction, insight, and his book forms no unworthy close to a great literary tradition.
NIERSTEIN, a village of Germany, in the grand duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, on the left bank of the Rhine, 8 m. S. from Mainz by the railway to Worms. Pop. (1905) 4445. It contains a Roman Catholic and a Protestant church, an old Roman bath—Sironabad—and sulphur springs. It is famous for its wines, in which a large export trade is done. Nierstein was originally a Roman settlement, and was a royal residence under the Carolingian rulers. Later it passed from the emperor to the elector palatine of the Rhine.
NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH WILHELM (1844–1900), German philosopher, was the son of the pastor at Röcken, near Leipzig, where he was born on 15th October 1844. He was educated at Schulpforta, and studied the classics at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. In 1869, while still an undergraduate, he was, on F. W. Ritschl’s recommendation, appointed to an extraordinary professorship of classical philology in the university of Basel, and rapidly promoted to an ordinary professorship. Here he almost immediately began a brilliant literary activity, which gradually assumed a more and more philosophical character. In 1876 eye (and brain) trouble caused him to obtain sick leave, and finally, in 1879, to be pensioned. For the next ten years he lived in various health resorts, in considerable suffering (he declares that the year contained for him 200 days of pure pain), but dashing off, at high pressure, the brilliant essays on which his fame rests. Towards the end of 1888, after recovering from an earlier attack, he was pronounced hopelessly insane, and in this condition he remained until he died on the 25th of August 1900. Nietzsche’s writings must be understood in their relation to these circumstances of his life, and as the outcome of a violent revolt against them on the part of an intensely emotional and nervous temperament. His philosophy, consequently, is neither systematic in itself nor expounded in systematic form. It is made up of a number of points of view which successively appeared acceptable to a personality whose self-appreciation verges more and more upon the insane, and exhibits neither consecutiveness nor consistency. Its natural form is the aphorism, and to this and to its epigrammatic brilliance, vigour, and uncompromising revolt against all conventions in science and conduct it owes its persuasiveness. Revolt against the whole civilized environment in which he was brought up is the keynote of Nietzsche’s literary career. His revolt against Christian faith and morals turns him into a proudly atheistic “free-thinker,” and preacher of a new “master” morality, which transposes the current valuations, deposes the “Christian virtues,” and incites the “over-man” ruthlessly to trample under foot the servile herd of the weak, degenerate and poor in spirit. His revolt against the theory of state supremacy turns him into an anarchist and individualist; his revolt against modern democracy into an aristocrat. His revolt against conventional culture leads him to attack D. F. Strauss as the typical “Philistine of culture”; his revolt against the fashion of pessimism to demand a new and more robust affirmation of life, not merely although, but because, it is painful. Indeed, his very love of life may itself be regarded as an indignant revolt against the toils that were inexorably closing in around him. He directs this spirit of revolt also against the sources of his own inspiration; he turns bitterly against Wagner, whose intimate friend and enthusiastic admirer he had been, and denounces him as the musician of decadent emotionalism; he rejects his “educator” Schopenhauer’s pessimism, and transforms his will to live into a “Will to Power.” Nevertheless his reaction does not in this case really carry him beyond the ground of Schopenhauerian philosophy, and his own may perhaps be most truly regarded as the paradoxical development of an inverted Schopenhauerism. Other influences which may be traced in his writings are those of modern naturalism and of a somewhat misinterpreted Darwinism (“strength” is generally interpreted as physical endowment, but it has sometimes to be reluctantly acknowledged that the physically feeble, by their combination and cunning, prove stronger than the “strong”). His writings in their chronological order are as follows: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872); Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (1873—1876) (Strauss—Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben—Schopenhauer als Erzieher—Richard Wagner in Bayreuth); Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1876–1880); Morgenröte (1881); Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882); Also sprach Zarathustra (1883–1884); Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886); Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887); Der Fall Wagner (1888); Götzendämmerung (1888); Nietzsche contra Wagner, Der Antichrist, and Poems first appeared in the complete edition of his works, which also contains the notes for Wille
