do innumerable times?' is the greatest determinant."[1] "Not to look for distant, unknown bliss and blessing and mercy, but so to live that we shall wish to live again and to live in the same way eternally!—our task comes to us in every instant."[2] The sort of life which made Nietzsche wish to live again we have just seen. Life was welcome, would be ad infinitum, when lit up with a thought like that described—when a vision of the Divine opened out to it. "God," in the permissible sense of that term, was just the maximal epoch or state of the developmental process, and the general course of existence was a making and unmaking of the Divine.[3] He particularly notes, in speaking of propagating the idea of "recurrence," that the outlook on the superman and the ethical legislation which naturally accompanies it, must come first—and then the doctrine of recurrence, "now endurable!"[4]
This thought of a possible sublime result compensated for all that was untoward, pitiful, or commonplace in life—yes, compensated for its recurrence also. For such is the connection and reciprocal dependence of things, that the great and the little, the good and the bad, must go together—as now, so in the future. If one moment of a man's life returns, the others must too. If we wish a single experience over again, we must wish all the rest.[5] "It is absolutely not the first question whether we are content with ourselves, but rather whether we are content with anything. For if we consent to a single moment, we have thereby consented not only to ourselves, but to all existence. For nothing stands by itself, whether in ourselves or in the world at large; and if only once our soul has trembled like a harp with happiness, all eternities were needed as a condition of this one happening—and all eternity was in this single moment of our consent approved, redeemed, justified, and affirmed."[6] From this point of view Zarathustra stretches out his hands, so to speak, in blessing on all existence. "Pain is also a joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun. … Say also to woe: go, but come again … joy wills the
