The Franco-German War had only just come to an end, and the keynote of
this polemical pamphlet is, "Beware of the intoxication of success."
When the whole of Germany was delirious with joy over her victory, at
a time when the unquestioned triumph of her arms tended rather to
reflect unearned glory upon every department of her social
organisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise the
warning voice and to apply the wet blanket. But Nietzsche did both,
and with spirit, because his worst fears were aroused. Smug content
(erbärmliches Behagen) was threatening to thwart his one purpose--the
elevation of man; smug content personified in the German scholar was
giving itself airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, and all
the while it was a mere cover for hidden rottenness and jejune
pedantry.

Nietzsche's attack on Hegelian optimism alone (pp. 46, 53-54), in the
first paper, fully reveals the fundamental idea underlying this essay;
and if the personal attack on Strauss seems sometimes to throw the
main theme into the background, we must remember the author's own
attitude towards this aspect of the case. Nietzsche, as a matter of
fact, had neither the spite nor the meanness requisite for the purely
personal attack. In his Ecce Homo, he tells us most emphatically: "I
have no desire to attack particular persons--I do but use a
personality as a magnifying glass; I place it over the subject to
which I wish to call attention, merely that the appeal may be
stronger." David Strauss, in a letter to a friend, soon after the
publication of the first Thought out of Season, expresses his utter
astonishment that a total stranger should have made such a dead set at
him. The same problem may possibly face the reader on every page of
this fssay: if, however, we realise Nietzsche's purpose, if we
understand his struggle to be one against "Culture-Philistinism" in