—“O Zarathustra,” said then his animals, “to those who think like us, things all dance themselves: they come and hold out the hand and laugh and flee—and return.
Everything goeth, everything returneth; eternally rolleth the wheel of existence. Everything dieth, everything blossometh forth again; eternally runneth on the year of existence.
Everything breaketh, everything is integrated anew; eternally buildeth itself the same house of existence. All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remaineth the ring of existence.
Every moment beginneth existence, around every ‘Here’ rolleth the ball ‘There.’ The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.”—
What the critics said
Brandes calls Zarathustra's eternal recurrence a somewhat shallow mysticism derived from the Pythagorean cycle and Ecclesiastes, the direct antithesis of Hartmann's world process ending in destruction, and notes that Blanqui and Le Bon advanced the same idea about the same time.
Mencken says that in Zarathustra Nietzsche treats recurrence as a philosophical speculation that well-nigh drives the prophet mad, quoting the passage in which Zarathustra will return with this sun, earth, eagle and serpent to the same life, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things.
Ludovici argues that Zarathustra's cry of 'Disgust!' at his abysmal thought shows how far Nietzsche fell short of his own ideal of the man who cries da capo to all existence: his life of illness, disappointment and snubs made it impossible for him to think of eternal recurrence without loathing.
Ludovici sets out Nietzsche's relation to Darwin and Spencer: Nietzsche accepts evolution but makes the organism's formative will primary over environment, treats adaptation as mere reactivity, and replaces the passive struggle for existence with an active struggle for power, of which self-preservation is only an indirect result.
Ludovici argues that depriving a higher man of his so-called wickedness may do violence to the greatest in him, and that the noblest wickedness, that of courage and determination, is vanishing under slave-moralities, which is why Nietzsche cried that man's baddest is so small and that to be brave is good.