—O mine animals, answered Zarathustra, talk on thus and let me listen! It refresheth me so to hear your talk: where there is talk, there is the world as a garden unto me.
How charming it is that there are words and tones; are not words and tones rainbows and seeming bridges ‘twixt the eternally separated?
To each soul belongeth another world; to each soul is every other soul a back-world.
Among the most alike doth semblance deceive most delightfully: for the smallest gap is most difficult to bridge over.
For me—how could there be an outside-of-me? There is no outside! But this we forget on hearing tones; how delightful it is that we forget!
Have not names and tones been given unto things that man may refresh himself with them? It is a beautiful folly, speaking; therewith danceth man over everything.
How lovely is all speech and all falsehoods of tones! With tones danceth our love on variegated rainbows.—
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.