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Introduction.

       Table of Contents

      When Nietzsche called his book The Dawn of Day, he was far from giving it a merely fanciful title to attract the attention of that large section of the public which judges books by their titles rather than by their contents. The Dawn of Day represents, figuratively, the dawn of Nietzsche's own philosophy. Hitherto he had been considerably influenced in his outlook, if not in his actual thoughts, by Schopenhauer, Wagner, and perhaps also Comte. Human, all-too-Human, belongs to a period of transition. After his rupture with Bayreuth, Nietzsche is, in both parts of that work, trying to stand on his own legs, and to regain his spiritual freedom; he is feeling his way to his own philosophy. The Dawn of Day, written in 1881 under the invigorating influence of a Genoese spring, is the dawn of this new Nietzsche. “With this book I open my campaign against morality,” he himself said later in his autobiography, the Ecce Homo.

      Just as in the case of the books written in his prime—The Joyful Wisdom, Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Genealogy of Morals—we cannot fail to be impressed in this work by Nietzsche's deep psychological insight, the insight that showed him to be a powerful judge of men and things unequalled in the nineteenth or, perhaps, any [pg vi] other century. One example of this is seen in his searching analysis of the Apostle Paul (Aphorism 68), in which the soul of the “First Christian” is ruthlessly and realistically laid bare to us. Nietzsche's summing-up of the Founder of Christianity—for of course, as is now generally recognised, it was Paul, and not Christ, who founded the Christian Church—has not yet called forth those bitter attacks from theologians that might have been expected, though one reason for this apparent neglect

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