Nietszche's most famous work, Also sprach Zarathustra, is still one of the most baffling books in modern philosophical literature. It presents such a complete revaluation of all established religious values that any new light thrown on the religious development of its author is sure to be welcomed. There can be little doubt that the man who gave the world what he thought and many others still think to be a New Gospel must have lived an unusually rich religious life. It is only natural that anyone vitally interested in the unconventional religious views of the mature Nietzsche should feel constrained to inquire into their origin and early stages of evolution. Now one of the most remarkable facts about Nietzsche is that, thanks to the foresight of his sister, more records of his early intellectual development have been preserved than of any other writer of comparable significance. Thus far, however, even detailed books on Nietzsche, including the most painstaking of them all, Charles Andler's six volumes entitled Nietzsche, sa vie et sa pensée, have failed to give an adequate analysis of his early religious development. This serious gap in scholarship concerning Nietzsche was due in part to the non-existence of an edition of Nietzsche's complete works. The recent publication of the first three volumes of the Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe of Nietzsche's works allows us, for the first time, to trace as fully as we may hope to trace, Nietzsche's religious development from his early boyhood to the end of his student days.

Spanish halagar, Old Spanish falagar 'to wheedle,' along with Catalan afalagar, Portuguese afagar, having the same meaning, is referred by Meyer-Lübke to Arabic halaka, defined as 'glatt machen'; but since this Arabic word, spelled with hha (h), not cha (h), means 'to shave (the head, etc.),' the etymology stated by Meyer-Lübke is evidently erroneous. Lokotsch derives the Romance group from the intensive form of kalaka 'to create'; that is, ⨿laka, defined as meaning ‘schön formen, glatt machen, Lügen erfinden’; but if the etymon contained a double l, it would have remained as ll in Spanish, as Baist long ago pointed out. Baist himself met this difficulty by assuming that the first stem of ⨿aka, meaning normally 'to create,' must also have had the sense of the intensive stem, which, he says, was used in Spain meaning 'to beguile.' A more satisfactory starting-point, avoiding both phonetic difficulty and problematic definition, is the third stem of halaka 'to create'; that is, hālaka, ‘to treat (a person) kindly.‘ The slight semantic shift envolved obviously presents no difficulty.

It is only within the last few decades that scholars have been inclined to agree with Andreas Schmeller's statement regarding the origin of the polite Sie-plural forms in modern German: “Den schon ums Jahr 1683 vorkommenden Höflichkeits-Plural Sie haben wir Deutsche vermuthlich dem ellipsierten Plural Euer Gnaden zu verdanken.”