In the years 1883-85, he produced work which he himself regarded as his highest achievement. Written in the style of an Old Testament prophet, this work which was his own New Testament, the gospel of the superman and the eternal recurrence, was entitled Also Sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch fur Alle and Keinen. Nietzsche provided a valuable interpretation of this work, parts of which even to-day are difficult to understand, in the two volumes of .1 enseits von Gut and Bose (1335-86) and Ge nealogie der Moral (1887). He then planned a greater work, Der Wille zur Macht: V ersuch zur Umwertung aller Werte. It was never finished, but contains no less than 1,052 valuable aphorisms: its two volumes (Vols. xiv. and xv. in the English works) are divided into the following sections :—(1) European Nihilism, (2) A Criticism of the Highest Values that have prevailed hitherto, (3) The Principles of a New Valuation, (4) Discipline and Breed ing. The three fine and stimulating books, Gotzendeimmerung, oder wie man mit dein Hammer philosophiert, Der Antichrist, and the autobiography Ecce Homo, date from his last and exceptionally productive period, the year 1888.
At the turn of the year (1888-89) Nietzsche broke down, prob ably from overwork ; for, outwardly calm as his life had been, the philosopher had suffered most violent moral upheavals, and had moreover recorded his innermost experience in a brief space of time in a number of carefully thought out works. Another cause of his breakdown was probably his extreme loneliness; only in the last year of his conscious life was he "discovered" by the Danish-European critic and author, Georg Brandes; he himself had neither followers nor disciples. We may take him at his word when, on July 8, 1886, he writes to his sister :—"My health is really quite normal—only my soul is so sensitive and so full of longing for good friends of my own kind. Get me a small circle of men who will listen to me and understand me—and I shall be cured." Nietzsche lived on for another 12 years, first with his mother at Naumburg and, after the latter's death, with his widowed sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche at Weimar, where he died on Aug. 25, 1900. He was buried in the churchyard of Rocken.
life out of his inner consciousness, but lived and suffered it—a fact which explains both his language, free from learned jargon, and his half pathetic, half ironical style, which is yet always so full of poetry and metaphor.
Nietzsche, as we have seen, started his philosophical career with Schopenhauer—the philosopher who took such a gloomy and despondent view of life that at last, in wrath over his own aver sions, he denied the will to life altogether. In the end Nietzsche came to regard Schopenhauer's principal work as the outpourings of a melancholy young man. Its author never fought his way through to cheerful maturity, but remained fettered to the doc trines he had laid down early in life. Nietzsche, whose motto was, "Only he who altereth remains unalterably mine," condemned this lack of capacity for development.
The changes in Nietzsche's own nature took place under the influence of Pre-Socratic antiquity; by this standard he weighed both Schopenhauer's and every other philosophy which either denied or was hostile to life. He saw that pagan antiquity had said "yea" to life; but that there had been, and now existed, other and different judgments and valuations of existence and "things." The attitude of civilization towards existence and "things," depended upon that civilization's values; and values may be either life promoting or life-arresting.