Part III

. Under the caption, "The Old and the New Tables," we have an important summing up of the principal teachings in the Nietzschean philosophical scheme. Here also we meet the doctrine of eternal recurrence which, as I have said, generated the conception of this book. Its present statement is limited to a few tentative speculations; later on it was developed and set forth with greater force and certainty. But despite the fact that in his autobiography Nietzsche calls this speculative philosophic doctrine "the highest of all possible formulæ of a Yea-saying philosophy," too much importance must not be attached to it in its relation to his writings. In the first place it was by no means new with him: he himself reconnoitred a bit in one of his early essays looking for its possible origin. And in the second place it had little influence on his main doctrine of the superman. Although he spent considerable time and space in its elucidation, it never became an integral part of any of his teachings. Rather was it something superimposed on his other formulæ--a condition introduced into the actualities of his conception of the universe. I am inclined to think that he flirted with this idea of recurrence largely because it was the most disheartening obstacle he could conceive in the path of the superman; and as no obstacle was too great to be faced triumphantly by this man of the future, he imposed this condition of eternal recurrence upon him as an ultimate test of fortitude. This idea would have added the final touch of futility to ambition, and Nietzsche could not conceive of true greatness in man unless futility was at the bottom of all ambitions. However, it is possible to eliminate the entire idea of eternal recurrence from Nietzsche's work without altering fundamentally any of his main teachings, for it is, in his very conception of it, a deputy condition of existence.