For an opinion of Nietzsche during his last phase I cannot do better than quote Professor Henri Lichtenberger of Nancy, who saw the invalid in 1898; and with this sympathetic Frenchman's valuable observations, I shall draw this chapter to a close:—
"In the gradual wane of this enthusiastic lover of life, of this apologist of energy, of this prophet of Superman there is something inexpressibly sad—inexpressibly beautiful and peaceful. His brow is still magnificent—his eyes, the light of which seems to be directed inwards, have an expression which is indefinably and profoundly moving. What is going on within his soul? Nobody can say. It is just possible that he may have preserved a dim recollection of his life as a thinker and a poet."
[1] Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche's by Frau Förster-Nietzsche.
[Chapter II]
Nietzsche the Amoralist
From a casual study of Nietzsche's life it might be gathered that he had little time for private meditation or for any lonely brooding over problems foreign to his school and university studies. Indeed, from the very moment when it was decided that he should become a scholar, to the day when the University of Leipzig granted him his doctor's degree without examination, his existence seems to have been so wholly occupied by strenuous application to the duties which his aspirations imposed upon him that, even if he had had the will to do so, it would seem that he could not have had the leisure to become engaged in any serious thought outside his regular work. Nevertheless, if we inquire into the matter more deeply, we find to our astonishment, that during the whole of that arduous period—from his thirteenth to this twenty-fourth year—his imagination did not once cease from playing around problems of the highest import, quite unrelated to his school and university subjects.
In the introduction to The Genealogy of Morals, he writes as follows: —"... while but a boy of thirteen the problem of the origin of evil haunted me: to it I dedicated, in an age when we have in heart half-play, half-God, my first literary child-play, my first philosophical composition; and, as regards my solution of the problem therein, well, I gave, as is but fair, God the honour, and made him Father of evil."[1] And then he continues: "A little historical and philological schooling, together with an inborn and delicate sense regarding psychological questions, changed my problem in a very short time into that other one: under what circumstances and conditions did man invent the valuations good and evil? And what is their own specific value?"
This problem, as stated here, seems stupendous enough; in fact, it would be difficult, in the whole realm of human thought, to discover a question of greater moment and intricacy; and yet we shall see that Nietzsche was just as much born to attack and solve it as Cardinal Newman seems, from the Apologia pro Vita Sua, to have been born to the Roman Catholic Church.