Chapter XLII

.). But if one ask oneself what the conditions to such an attitude are, one will realise immediately how utterly different Nietzsche was from his ideal. The man who insatiably cries da capo to himself and to the whole of his mise-en-scene, must be in a position to desire every incident in his life to be repeated, not once, but again and again eternally. Now, Nietzsche’s life had been too full of disappointments, illness, unsuccessful struggles, and snubs, to allow of his thinking of the Eternal Recurrence without loathing—hence probably the words of the last verse.

In verses 15 and 16, we have Nietzsche declaring himself an evolutionist in the broadest sense—that is to say, that he believes in the Development Hypothesis as the description of the process by which species have originated. Now, to understand his position correctly we must show his relationship to the two greatest of modern evolutionists—Darwin and Spencer. As a philosopher, however, Nietzsche does not stand or fall by his objections to the Darwinian or Spencerian cosmogony. He never laid claim to a very profound knowledge of biology, and his criticism is far more valuable as the attitude of a fresh mind than as that of a specialist towards the question. Moreover, in his objections many difficulties are raised which are not settled by an appeal to either of the men above mentioned. We have given Nietzsche’s definition of life in the Note on