NIETZSCHE.

I.

There is a continuity and heredity in the transmission of ideas as
there is in the transmission of life. Each great thinker has a
spiritual posterity, which for centuries perpetuates his doctrine and
his moral personality. And there is no keener intellectual enjoyment
than to trace back to their original progenitors one of those mighty
and original systems which are the milestones in the history of human
thought.

It is with such a spiritual transmission that I am concerned in the
present paper. I would like to establish the intimate connection which
exists between Montaigne and Nietzsche, between the greatest of French
moralists and the greatest of Germans. A vast literature has grown up
in recent years round the personality and works of Nietzsche, which
would already fill a moderately sized library. It is therefore strange
that no critic should have emphasized and explained the close
filiation between him and Montaigne. It is all the more strange
because Nietzsche himself has acknowledged his debt to the "Essays"
with a frankness which leaves no room to doubt.

To anyone who knows how careful Nietzsche was to safeguard his
originality, such an acknowledgment is in itself sufficient proof of
the immense power which Montaigne wielded over Nietzsche at a decisive
and critical period of his intellectual development. But only a
systematic comparison could show that we have to do here with
something more than a mental stimulus and a quickening of ideas, that
Montaigne's "Essays" have provided the foundations of Nietzsche's
philosophy, and that the Frenchman may rightly be called, and in a
very definite sense, the "spiritual father" of the German.

II.

At first sight this statement must appear paradoxical, and a first
reading of the two writers reveals their differences rather than their
resemblances. The one strikes us as essentially the sane; the other,
even in his first books, reveals that lack of mental balance which
was to terminate in insanity. The one is a genial sceptic; the other
is a fanatic dogmatist. To Montaigne life is a comedy; to his disciple
life is a tragedy. The one philosophizes with a smile; the other, to
use his own expression, philosophizes with a hammer. The one is a
Conservative; the other is a herald of revolt. The one is
constitutionally moderate and temperate; the other is nearly always
extreme and violent in his judgment. The one is a practical man of the
world; the o