strip it of limitations, is much the same as the Divine or God. It includes a justice, a love, a wisdom, a power, a beauty—in short, a total perfection—which are only suggested in anything we see or are. A distinction must be drawn between the ideal and the question of its actual embodiment anywhere (e.g., in a Divine Being or Beings)—also, between it and the question whether human life and conduct can actually be shaped in complete accordance with its demands. To both these questions Nietzsche felt obliged to reply negatively. We have already noted that he was atheist; and such in his eyes was the constitution of things that human life and action had to fall short of the ideal, and even to go counter to it to a certain extent. So little, however, does this mean that he failed to revere the ideal, that it was in its name that be, with Schopenhauer, pronounced the world undivine, and it was because of the sense of a contradiction between what ought to be and what is that pain and distress became so deep a part of his lot as a thinker. There only remained to make the ideal interpenetrate reality to the extent the conditions of existence would allow—and this was what his aim practically came to. It was as if he said, If God does not exist, let us see how near we can come to him. How truly this was the substance of his aim, and how strongly his feelings were enlisted, is manifest in an ejaculation which he imagines a disciple of culture making, and which, I take it, is a self-confession: "I see something higher and more human above me than I myself am; help me all to attain it, as I will help every one who feels and suffers as I do: in order that at last the man may arise who is full and measureless in knowledge and love and vision and power, and with his whole being cleaves to nature and takes his place in it as judge and valuer of things."[1] In another connection he says, "For what purpose the world exists, why humanity exists, need not for the time concern us.… But why thou thyself art here, that thou mayest ask, and if no one else can tell it thee, seek to give a meaning to thy existence as it were a posteriori, by giving to thyself an aim, a goal, a wherefore, a high and noble wherefore."[2] To state the aim more concretely: since the character-
