Daybreak and Grand inspiration 205and everything we do not experience... like pathetic souls of children
scared off by a rustling sound and a shadow" (3,307; D § 538). The souls
of children require protection; they are vulnerable and need to be loved.
They have yet to experience the heroism of the truth. This aphorism in
Daybreak depicts the distress of an eagle with injured wings in
Nietzsche's disheartening summer of 1880.
Nietzsche tried to pull himself together, declaring that only the
pathetic soul of a child had caused him to question the value of truth. It
is crucial, he asserted, to ward off doubts that set in at a moment of
weakness when we crave love. When truth grows weak in confronting
the power of love, one must simply transform the will to truth into pas-
sion. Nietzsche wrote in this vein in Daybreak: "Truth requires power. Truth
is not power in and of itself.... Rather, it has to draw power over to its
side" (3,306; D § 535). He did not mean political or social power, but
rather the power of life. It is a question of whether the driving force
behind knowledge is suffidendy "powerful" to stand up to other
motives, and whether it is possible, at least after the fact, to equip knowl-
edge and "truths" with a driving force and thereby make them fit for life.
Nietzsche's thoughts had been circling in on this connection since the
summer of 1880, and he used the term "incorporation" to describe it
His first recorded reference to this term is a notebook entry of August
1881, after a flash of inspiration on the Surlej boulder of Sils-Maria,
when the idea of eternal recurrence came to him. He was determined to
"support instincts as a basis of all knowledge, but recognize where they
become adversaries of knowledge; in summa, find out to what extent
knowledge and truth can be incorporated" (9,495).
By about 1875, Nietzsche had grasped the fact that we cannot delib-
erately cling to illusions that are useful for life. Once he had projected
himself into the role of the free spirit "who wants nothing more than to
lose some comforting belief on a daily basis" (Β 5,185; Sept. 22, 1876),
there were no more "forbidden" truths that had to remain unspoken for
the sake of life. It was not merely this more recent fearless attitude
toward knowledge that made him reject a regimen of truth; it was also a