Library of Friedrich Nietzsche

[2] Late in life he read Spinoza, whom he called his "precursor", in particular for his criticisms of free will, teleology and his thoughts on the role of affects, joy and sadness.

Nietzsche read in 1883 Paul Bourget's Essais de psychologie contemporaine, from which he borrowed the French term décadence.

[14] In a letter of 26 February 1888 to Peter Gast, Nietzsche mentions his reading of the posthumous works of Charles Baudelaire (published in 1887).

[16] Besides Lange, he read the anti-Darwinist botanist Carl Nägeli's Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre (1884) in the period of Beyond Good and Evil, which became his main source concerning physiology.

[18] He also read Tolstoy's My Religion (Paris, 1885), the Jewish historian Julius Wellhausen on Arab antiquities and his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin, 1882), the first volume of the Journal of the Goncourt brothers, thoughts of Benjamin Constant on German theater, Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus — whom he opposed —, and Dostoevsky's The Possessed (Paris, 1886 – read in 1887).

[11][19] Julius Wellhausen became famous for his critical investigations into Old Testament history and into the composition of the Hexateuch, the uncompromising scientific attitude he adopted in testing its problems bringing him into antagonism with the older school of biblical interpreters.