We ourselves
are--suppose you want a formula--the consummate self-dissolution of
morals." [1]
[Footnote 1: Nietzsche, 'Werke,' iv. pp. 8, 9 (1899). The translation
is taken (with corrections) from the English version by Johanna Volz
(1903). Nietzsche has so shocked and confused the English printer that
when the author writes himself an 'immoralist' the compositor has
made him call himself an 'immortalist.' And errors of the sort do not
affect the printer only. Nietzsche's sneer at 'Femininism' is deftly
turned aside by Miss Volz, by the simple device of substituting for
it the word Pessimism. And Dr Tille, the translator of his best-known
work, 'Thus spake Zarathustra' (1896, p. xix), has been bemused in
an even more wonderful manner. He enumerates "the best known
representatives" of Anarchic tendencies in political thought as
"Humboldt, Dunoyer, Stirner, Bakounine, and Auberon Spencer"! The
vision of Mr Auberon Herbert and Mr Herbert Spencer doubled up into a
single individual is 'a thing imagination boggles at.' Perhaps it is
the translator's idea of the _Uebermensch_.]
Perhaps it is impossible to understand Nietzsche unless one admits
that his writings show traces of the disease which very soon prevented
his writing at all. But at the same time, while that is true, there is
much more in his work than the ravings of a distempered mind.
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