Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/716

710 men, they alone are worth while; the little men, the weaklings, the many, the all-too-many, the mediocre, the half-and-half, the commonplace, every-day people, all these are worthless. "A time will come," says Nietzsche, "in which we shall no longer consider the masses, but again the individuals, who form a kind of bridge over the seething stream of becoming. These individuals are not continuers of a process; they live timeless-contemporaneous lives; thanks to history which allows such cooperation, they live as the republic of geniuses of whom Schopenhauer once said: One giant calls to the other through the intervening spaces of time; and undisturbed by the impish noisy pigmies that crawl at their feet, they continue their high intellectual converse.—No, the goal of humanity can not lie at the end, but only in its highest exemplars." "All civilization is the creation of great individuals and for them." "Everywhere among a people we find the traces of the lions of the intellect who have passed through it; in morals, in religion, everywhere the masses have bowed to the influence of individuals." "The great men are necessary, the times in which they appear are accidental." A people is only a roundabout way for producing a few great men. "Neither the state nor the people nor mankind exists for its own sake; the climaxes, the great individuals, are the goal—but this goal points far beyond mankind. From all this it is clear that the genius does not exist for the sake of mankind; he is the climax and final goal of mankind." "Such overmensupermen [sic], such happy accidents, have always been possible and will perhaps always be possible. And even whole families, tribes and peoples may under certain circumstances be regarded as such prizes in the lottery of existence." But nature is surprised herself when she produces such a masterpiece; she is a spendthrift and wastes a lot of material. Mankind should try to produce these geniuses consciously and purposely. The purpose of civilization is to hasten the birth and the development of the philosophers, the artists and the saints within us and without us, and thus to cooperate in the highest perfection of nature. The young man should be taught to regard himself "as a failure of nature, as it were, but at the same time as an evidence of the greatest and most marvelous purposes of this artist; she did not succeed, he should tell himself, but I will honor her great purpose by placing myself at her service that she may have better success at some other time." "I do not look for happy periods in history," says our philosopher, "but for such as offer a favorable soil for the production of the genius. The greatest calamity that could befall mankind would be the failure to produce the highest types of life." "We can by happy inventions educate a wholly different and higher individual than the one thus far produced by accident. Here lie our hopes in the breeding of eminent human beings."

The goal, we see, is the overman, the genius, a higher, stronger,