Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/80

64 existence, social arrangements and activity having normally the production or facilitation of them as their ultimate object, to whatever extent they appear at any given time, they are to be supremely considered, the rest of us finding our highest function in serving them, rather than in serving ourselves or one another. It must be admitted that Nietzsche parts company thus at the start with the humanitarian, equalitarian, democratic ideals which rule among us today. Once he refers to the processes by which (according to the Darwinian view) progress, the evolution of higher species, has taken place in the animal and plant world. The matter of critical moment, the starting-point for a further development in a given species, has been some unusual specimen—some variation from the average type, to use Darwin's term—which now and then under favorable conditions arose. Not the average members of the species and their welfare, not those either which came last in point of time and their welfare, were of maximum importance or the goal of the species' development, but just these scattering and apparently accidental specimens and their welfare, by means of which the transition to a new species became possible. In the lower realms the progress was unintended and unconscious, but the method by which it was secured may be pursued in higher realms, and just because we human beings are conscious and may have a conscious aim, we may search out and establish the conditions favorable to the rise of our higher specimens and not leave them to come by chance, and so develope along the human line of progress in an unprecedented manner. Schopenhauer had said, "Humanity should labor continually to produce individual great men—and this and nothing else is its task," and Nietzsche now repeats it after him. Still more definitely, "How does thy individual life receive its highest value, its deepest significance! Surely only in that thou livest to the advantage of the rarest and most valuable specimens of thy kind, not to that of the most numerous, i.e., taken singly, least valuable specimens."

The classifying of men as ends and means is not, however, a part of Nietzsche's ideal itself, but a result of the way in which men actually present themselves in the world. Some