1. The conceptual system which permeates this entire work, and in which the majority of [Nietzsche's] thoughts are expressed, is based on the metaphysics of Schopenhauer. This is reflected both in the terminology and in the basic treatment of the problem. Metaphysics as a direction of philosophical thinking is an attempt at a direct definition of reality in conceptual form. It is meant to be a precise, intellectually formulated answer to the question, What is reality? What is the absolute? The possibility of posing these questions is given in the basic division which we always and everywhere encounter in our experience: body and soul, objective and subjective objects, the world as seen from the outside and as felt to have an additional inner essence. This dualism assumes various forms which coincide in part, and in part are mutually contradictory; but the heterogeneity, the absence of a bridge between these two basically different worlds, is always in the foreground. However, something more than purely empirical dualism is hidden in the very posing of the basic question of metaphysics. Defining something to be an absolute reality, and consequently relegating everything else to the order of appearances, of something negative and secondary, already contains a value judgement and thus emotional factors in addition to purely conceptual, cognitive ones. And indeed metaphysics is something more than a philosophical discipline, it is a basic symptom of certain features in the structure of the human soul.