at the age of ten, tending thereafter in a more scientific direction and keeping their religion in a weaker, pantheistic form, they at last leave the ideas of God, immortality, and the like quite behind, but yield to the charms of a metaphysical philosophy. In course of time, however, this too becomes incredible. On the other hand, art appears to last, and for a while the metaphysics lingers as a form of art or as a transfiguring artistic mood. But the scientific sense grows ever more imperative and conducts the full-grown man to natural science and history and especially into strictest methods of thinking, while to art falls an ever milder and more modest significance.[1] Nietzsche thinks that this is a kind of epitome of the intellectual history of humanity—it is at least, we may say, a summary of his own personal history down to and into his second period.
Nietzsche had a friend at this time—really since 1874—by the name of Paul Rée. He was a positivist of the French and English type. He had written a book, Psychological Observations, which impressed Nietzsche, and during the winter of 1876-77 they were together in Sorrento, where Rée wrote another book, The Origin of the Moral Sentiments, a copy of which he presented to Nietzsche with the inscription, "To the father of this book from its most grateful mother." g Undoubtedly Nietzsche influenced him, and yet he as certainly influenced Nietzsche. He seems to have particularly directed Nietzsche's attention to Pascal and Voltaire and Prosper Mérimée; he was already in that world of historical study and of fine psychological analysis which Nietzsche was to make his own, and Nietzsche once humorously dubbed his new standpoint "Réealismus." Yet a radically determining influence may be doubted. h Nietzsche's general positivistic tendency really began as far back as when his first doubts arose as to Schopenhauer's metaphysical interpretation of the will. He speaks, indeed, of his "new philosophy,"[2] but he is aware that "nature makes no leaps," and says that it is the task of the biographer to remember this principle.[3] This second period is only relatively, not absolutely distinguished from the first. i
