"At this moment I feel myself seized by an extraordinary desire for knowledge, for universal culture. That impulse comes to me from Humboldt, whom I have just read. May it prove as lasting as my love for poetry!"
He now mapped out a vast programme of study in which geology, botany, and astronomy were combined with readings in the Latin stylists, Hebrew, military science, and all the techniques. "And above all things," said he, "Religion, the foundation of all knowledge. Great is the domain of knowledge, infinite the search after truth."
A winter and spring-time sped away while the boy worked on. But now came his second holidays, then the third return to school; it was when autumn had denuded the great oaks on the estate of Pforta. Friedrich Nietzsche is seventeen years of age, and he is sad. Too long had he imposed upon himself a painful obedience; he had read Schiller, Hölderlin, Byron; he dreams of the Gods of Greece, and of the sombre Manfred, that all-powerful magician who, weary of his omnipotence, vainly sought repose in the death which his art had conquered. What cares Nietzsche for the lessons of his professors? He meditates on the lines of the romantic poet:
"Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The tree of knowledge is not that of life."
He grows weary at last. He longs to escape from the routine of classes, from tasks which absorb his whole life. He would listen to his soul alone, and thus come to understand the dreams with which his mind overflows. He confides in his mother and his sister, and declares that his projects for the future have changed. The thought of the University bores him; he now wants to be not a professor, but a musician. His mother reasons with him, and succeeds in appeasing him a little. But her success is not for long. The death of a master to whom he had been attached completes his confusion of mind. He neglects his work, isolates himself, and meditates.
He writes. From his earliest childhood he had had the instinct of the phrase and the word, the instinct of visible thought. He writes incessantly, and not one shade of his unrest has remained hidden from us. He surveys the vast universe of romanticism and of science, sombre, restless, and loveless. This monstrous vision fascinates and frightens him. The pious ways of his boyhood still hold him under their influence; he reproaches himself for his inclinations towards audacity and negation, as if for sins. He strives to retain his religious faith, which is dwindling day by day. He does not break with it sharply in the French and Catholic manner, but slowly and fearfully detaches himself; slowly, because he venerates those dogmas or symbols which stand for all his past, for his memories of his home and his father; fearfully, because he knows that in renouncing the old security he will find not a new security to take its place, but a surging throng of problems. Weighing the supreme gravity of the choice imposed on him, he meditates:
"Such an enterprise," he writes, "is the work not of a few weeks but of a life-time: can it be that, armed solely with the results of a boy's reflections, any one will venture to destroy the authority of two thousand years, guaranteed as it is by the deepest thinkers of all the centuries? Can it be that with his own mere fancies and rudiments of thought any one will venture to thrust aside from him all that anguish and benediction of religion with which history is profoundly penetrated?
"To decide at a stroke those philosophical problems about which human thought has maintained an unending war for many thousands of years; to revolutionise beliefs which, accepted by men of the weightiest authority, first lifted man up to the level of true humanity; to link up Philosophy with the natural sciences, without as much as knowing the general results of the one or the others; and finally to derive from those natural sciences a system of reality, when the mind has not yet grasped either the unity of universal history, or the most essential principles—it is a masterpiece of rashness....
"What then is humanity? We hardly know: one stage in a whole, one period in a process of Becoming, an arbitrary production of God? Is man aught else than a stone evolved through the intermediary worlds of flora and fauna? Is he from this time forward a completed being, or what has history in reserve for him? Is this eternal Becoming to have no end? What are the springs of this great clock? They are hidden; but however long be the duration of that vast hour which we call history, they are at every moment the same. The crises are inscribed on the dial-face: the hand moves on, and when it has reached the twelfth hour, it begins another series: it inaugurates a period in the history of humanity.