Project Gutenberg 2025-05-13 Public domain in the USA. 251 Ellis, Havelock 1859 1939 Ellis, Henry Havelock 12004273 Affirmations $aLondon :$bWalter Scott, Limited, $c1898. Nietzsche -- Casanova -- Zola -- Huysmans -- St. Francis and others. Jens Sadowski, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) "Affirmations" by Havelock Ellis is a collection of literary-critical essays written in the late 19th century. It uses writers and saints as occasions for probing the “literature of life,” testing moral ideas and cultural assumptions rather than judging art for art’s sake. The pieces engage the most questionable aspects of conduct and belief to state a few enduring “affirmations,” while pressing readers to form their own. The opening of the work presents a preface and a long study of Nietzsche. Ellis contrasts a pure art-literature that raises no ethical questions with a literature close to life where morality must be examined, and he announces his intent to offer personal affirmations against the era’s self-congratulation. He then traces Nietzsche’s career—ancestry and austere youth, Pforta training, early devotion to Schopenhauer and Wagner, rise as a philologist, The Birth of Tragedy, the Bayreuth crisis and break with Wagner amid worsening health, the freethinking aphoristic middle period, the later “immoralist” doctrines, and the final mental collapse. Along the way he distils Nietzsche’s key ideas: Dionysian affirmation, the attack on Christianity and pity, conscience as tradition, the call to hardness and self-mastery, and the contrast between “slave” and “master” moralities, set against sharp national judgments and admiration for French clarity. He closes this opening section by valuing the middle Nietzsche most, proposing the dancer as his guiding image, and treating philosophy as personal psychology rather than a universal system. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://archive.org/details/affirmations00elli/ 20210927012424ellis 1898 uk Reading ease score: 53.4 (10th to 12th grade). Somewhat difficult to read. en Literature and morals PN Text Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches Category: British Literature Category: Philosophy & Ethics 427472 2025-07-30T06:36:26.689890 text/html 402959 2025-05-13T10:18:12 text/html 348956 2025-07-30T06:36:32.791856 application/epub+zip 350352 2025-07-30T06:36:28.085929 application/epub+zip 275801 2025-07-30T06:36:27.302866 application/epub+zip 430149 2025-07-30T06:36:36.619907 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 401108 2025-07-30T06:36:32.312880 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 391649 2025-07-30T06:36:26.155912 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 371800 2025-05-13T10:18:12 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 13943 2025-07-30T06:36:36.891881 application/rdf+xml 7299 2025-07-30T06:36:27.499884 image/jpeg 1631 2025-07-30T06:36:27.400917 image/jpeg 326362 2025-07-30T06:36:26.738996 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog en.wikipedia