Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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_Human all-too-Human,_ with its two sequels, is the memorial of a crisis. It is called a book for free spirits: almost every sentence in it is the expression of a triumph--by means of it I purged myself of everything in me which was foreign to my nature. Idealism is foreign to me: the title of the book means: "Where ye see ideal things I see--human, alas! all-too-human things!" ... I know men better. The word "free spirit" in this book must not be understood as anything else than a spirit that has become free, that has once more taken possession of itself. My tone, the pitch of my voice, has completely changed; the book will be thought clever, cool, and at times both hard and scornful. A certain spirituality, of noble taste, seems to be ever struggling to dominate a passionate torrent at its feet. In this respect there is some sense in the fact that it was the hundredth anniversary of Voltaire's death that served, so to speak, as an excuse for the publication of the book as early as 1878. For Voltaire, as the opposite of every one who wrote after him, was above all a grandee of the intellect; precisely what I am also.
The name of Voltaire on one of my writings--that was verily a step forward--in my direction.... Looking into this book a little more closely, you perceive a pitiless spirit who knows all the secret hiding-places in which ideals are wont to skulk--where they find their dungeons, and, as it were, their last refuge. With a torch in my hand, the light of which is not by any means a flickering one, I illuminate this nether world with beams that cut like blades. It is war, but war without powder and smoke, without warlike attitudes, without pathos and contorted limbs--all these things would still be "idealism." One error after the other is quietly laid upon ice; the ideal is not refuted,--it freezes. Here, for instance, "genius" freezes; round the corner the "saint" freezes; under a thick icicle the "hero" freezes; and in the end "faith" itself freezes. So-called "conviction" and also "pity" are considerably cooled--and almost everywhere the "thing in itself" is freezing to death.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.