Note 4 — NIETZSCHE. (continued 2)

Pater’s description of the transition we may trace from the easy prose of Pascal’s first book to the “perpetual agonia” of his later work, applies with scarcely a change to the similar transition in Nietzsche:—“Everywhere in the Letters he had seemed so great a master—a master of himself—never at a loss, taking the conflict so lightly, with so light a heart: in the great Atlantean travail of the Thoughts his feet sometimes ‘are almost gone.’ In his soul’s agony theological abstractions seem to become personal powers.... In truth, into his typical diagnosis, as it may seem, of the tragedy of the human soul, there have passed not merely the personal feelings, the temperament of an individual, but his malady also, a physical malady.”