with other fingers--with the fingers of the loving and
unembarrassed artist who is on good terms with the beautiful and who
feels able to create it and to enhance it with his touch. The question
of taste plays an important part in Nietzsche's philosophy, and verses
9, 10 of this discourse exactly state Nietzsche's ultimate views on the
subject. In the "Spirit of Gravity", he actually cries:--"Neither a good
nor a bad taste, but MY taste, of which I have no longer either shame or
secrecy."

Chapter XXXVI. The Land of Culture.

This is a poetical epitome of some of the scathing criticism of
scholars which appears in the first of the "Thoughts out of Season"--the
polemical pamphlet (written in 1873) against David Strauss and his
school. He reproaches his former colleagues with being sterile and
shows them that their sterility is the result of their not believing
in anything. "He who had to create, had always his presaging dreams and
astral premonitions--and believed in believing!" (See Note on Chapter
LXXVII.) In the last two verses he reveals the nature of his altruism.
How far it differs from that of Christianity we have already read in the
discourse "Neighbour-Love", but here he tells us definitely the nature
of his love to mankind; he explains why he was compelled to assail the
Christian values of pity and excessive love of the neighbour, not only
because they are slave-values and therefore tend to promote degeneration
(see Note B.), but because he could only love his children's land, the
undiscovered land in a remote sea; because he would fain retrieve the
errors of his fathers in his children.

Chapter XXXVII. Immaculate Perception.

An important feature of Nietzsche's interpretation of Life is disclosed
in this discourse. As Buckle suggests in his "Influence of Women on the
Progress of Knowledge", the scientific spirit of the investigator is
both helped and supplemented by the latter's emotions and personality,
and the divorce of all emotionalism and individual temperament from
science is a fatal step towards sterility. Zarathustra abjures all those
who would fain turn an IMPERSONAL eye upon nature and contemplate her
phenomena with that pure objectivity to which the scientific idealists
of to-day would so much like to attain. He accuses such idealists of
hypocrisy and guile; he says they lack innocence in their desires and
therefore slander all desiring.

Chapter XXXVIII. Scholars.

This is a record of Nietz