The Dawn of Day

Author of “The Quintessence of Nietzsche”, “Religions and Philosophers of the East” There are many dawns which have yet to shed their light.—RIG-VEDA. New York The MacMillan Company CONTENTS Introduction. Author’s Preface. Book I. Book II. Book III. Book IV. Book V. Footnotes INTRODUCTION. 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 other century.…