sity as well
as our thirst for possession thereof, have got out of hand--alas! that
nothing will now any longer satisfy us!--

"How could we still be content with THE MAN OF THE PRESENT DAY
after such outlooks, and with such a craving in our conscience and
consciousness? Sad enough; but it is unavoidable that we should look
on the worthiest aims and hopes of the man of the present day with
ill-concealed amusement, and perhaps should no longer look at them.
Another ideal runs on before us, a strange, tempting ideal full of
danger, to which we should not like to persuade any one, because we
do not so readily acknowledge any one's RIGHT THERETO: the ideal of
a spirit who plays naively (that is to say involuntarily and from
overflowing abundance and power) with everything that has hitherto
been called holy, good, intangible, or divine; to whom the loftiest
conception which the people have reasonably made their measure of value,
would already practically imply danger, ruin, abasement, or at least
relaxation, blindness, or temporary self-forgetfulness; the ideal of
a humanly superhuman welfare and benevolence, which will often enough
appear INHUMAN, for example, when put alongside of all past seriousness
on earth, and alongside of all past solemnities in bearing, word, tone,
look, morality, and pursuit, as their truest involuntary parody--and
WITH which, nevertheless, perhaps THE GREAT SERIOUSNESS only commences,
when the proper interrogative mark is set up, the fate of the soul
changes, the hour-hand moves, and tragedy begins..."

Although the figure of Zarathustra and a large number of the leading
thoughts in this work had appeared much earlier in the dreams and
writings of the author, "Thus Spake Zarathustra" did not actually come
into being until the month of August 1881 in Sils Maria; and it was the
idea of the Eternal Recurrence of all things which finally induced my
brother to set forth his new views in poetic language. In regard to his
first conception of this idea, his autobiographical sketch, "Ecce Homo",
written in the autumn of 1888, contains the following passage:--

"The fundamental idea of my work--namely, the Eternal Recurrence of
all things--this highest of all possible formulae of a Yea-saying
philosophy, first occurred to me in August 1881. I made a note of the
thought on a sheet of paper, with the postscript: 6,000 feet beyond
men and time! That day I happened to be wandering through the woods
alongside