The widespread pedagogic practice of treating Friedrich Nietzsche as a figure of nineteenth-century philosophy, along with Hegel and Karl Marx, actually does considerable violence to the real intellectual history of Germany. Evidence of Nietzsche's classical training and his admiration of classical civilization abounds throughout Daybreak. This chapter introduces some of the main themes of German Materialism. The central theme of Daybreak is its attack on morality. In Human, All Too Human, the work preceding Daybreak, Nietzsche began a long effort to free morality from the metaphysical world to which Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer had connected it. Daybreak suggests that they are of two types: first, a certain picture of human agents as free and morally responsible and second, false beliefs (or superstitions) that explain the moral regard with which ancient practices and customs were regarded and that function as causal presuppositions of people's moral feelings in the present.