Note 1072 — Chapter IV · LATER GERMAN CRITICISM.

This word has been objected to by precisians. But it has the authority of Thackeray: and if it had none, it is exactly the word wanted for a certain flagrant quality of the latest nineteenth century, and more especially for the ethos of Nietzsche. With all his originality in form, he is simply parasitic in fact. He can only deny and pervert and “topsyturvify” the established and accepted. The Uebermensch himself is much more an “Unmensch,” who is not to be God but an un-God. And the philosopher’s famous syllogism, “There cannot be a God, or why am I not one if there is?” amounts simply to a turning topsyturvy of the much sounder and in fact unanswerable argument, “There must be a God; for I am not one.”