can afford to question the binding nature of the law of Truth, least of all a thinker so obviously in earnest about his own prophetic message as Nietzsche was.  All his investigations presuppose the validity of this law for his own thought; all his utterances imply an appeal to it; and his influence depends on the confidence which others have in his veracity.  And on this one point only Nietzsche has to confess himself a child of the older morality.  “This book,” he says in the preface to one of the least paradoxical of his works, ‘Dawn of Day,’ “This book ... implies a contradiction and is not afraid of it:  in it we break with the faith in morals—­why?  In obedience to morality!  Or what name shall we give to that which passes therein?  We should prefer more modest names.  But it is past all doubt that even to us a ’thou shalt’ is still speaking, even we still obey a stern law above us—­and this is the last moral precept which impresses itself even upon us, which even we obey:  in this respect, if in any, we are still conscientious people—­viz., we do not wish to return to that which we consider outlived and decayed, to something ‘not worthy of belief,’ be it called God, virtue, truth, justice, charity; we do not approve of any deceptive bridges to old ideals, we are radically hostile to all that wants to mediate and to amalgamate with us; hostile to any actual religion and Christianity; hostile to all the vague, romantic, and patriotic feelings; hostile also to the love of pleasure and want of principle of the artists who would fain persuade us to worship when we no longer believe—­for we are artists; hostile, in short, to the whole European Femininism (or Idealism, if you prefer this name), which is ever ‘elevating’ and consequently ‘degrading.’  Yet, as such conscientious people, we immoralists and atheists of this day still feel subject to the German honesty and piety of thousands of years’ standing, though as their most doubtful and last descendants; nay, in a certain sense, as their heirs, as executors of their inmost will, a pessimist will, as aforesaid, which is not afraid of denying itself, because it delights in taking a negative position.  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.]