had their part in inducing him to write this strange book,[1] the main motives were deeper. He wanted to make clear who one with his extraordinary fortune was. "People confuse me," he says elsewhere, adding that it would be a great service if some one would defend and define him against these confusions; but, as things were, he had to come to his own help.[2] "Hear me!" he says in the preface, "I am so and so. Above all things do not confuse me with some one else! I will only add that though he magnifies himself, it is not as a superman, h or as a messiah, or as the founder of a religion, but simply as a bearer of ideas and messenger of a new culture. Indeed, he sharply marks himself off from prophets and founders of religions.[3] His underlying view is different. Men with great thoughts and inspirations in the past have usually attributed these to a Not-themselves, and masked their pride, or lost it, in humility. The divine in man they put outside him. "Not unto us, not unto us, but unto God be the glory," they said in substance. They may have been right, but Nietzsche thought otherwise. To him the ideas that came to him were his very self, the projection of his inmost will, and he, his self or will, was the outcome of a long course of purely natural evolution. This does not mean that he was without piety and reverence, but it was a natural and human piety, the reverence was self-reverence. At the same time the ideas might be detached from him individually and live after his self was gone. Indeed, to make them live on, to have them become seeds of a new human culture, was the practical meaning of his aim. Whether he overestimated his ideas and himself is another question. Perhaps he did. But the charge of megalomania or "colossal egotism" does not dispose of him. Others—particularly founders of religions—have spoken of themselves in far more swelling language than Nietzsche ever used; but we do not object to it, if we find it well-based—indeed, we do not call it "colossal egotism" at all.i
