What he knew of history he used for an analysis of values, and not for
State polity. He shrank from the irritations of reality, and he had
little patience with the national mania cultivated after Sedan, warning
his country that their victory was not one of a superior culture, that
Germany had no style but a barbaric mixture of many styles; and he
pointed out the essential difference between culture and erudition.
His unfinished work, "The Will to Power," was an attempt to house his
lyric passions in an architectural frame. The facade of the structure,
as posthumously revealed to us, is an indication that he was really
engaged in building a Tower of Babel. Power, Affirmation, Yea-Saying he
considered the attributes of life, and he found in them recompense for
his weakness and his lack of capacity for happiness. He was a master of
the exquisite nuances of vision, but since he touched real life at the
circumference, and not at the centre, his philosophical valuations are
bizarre, and have only a literary value.
It is superficial to make Treitschke and Bernhardi his disciples, as
some American writers have made Roosevelt his disciple.
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