Third Lecture

But then, around 1876, Nietzsche realized the pressure that this modern scientific attitude, which basically permeates everything that confronts the mind, can exert on the human soul. Ultimately, the power with which Nietzsche wanted to flee into a world of consolation in the face of the unsatisfactory nature of the external world of perception became crippled. He could no longer surrender to the belief that one could somehow find a way out of human existence itself into a comforting, self-created world, for he gradually came to perceive that which seeks to rise above the external reality of perception as a lie, as a deceitful illusion. And the years 1875 and 1876 became for him years in which, as he himself put it, he put one life lie after another on ice so that they would freeze to death.