Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/717

Rh better kind of man than our every-day man. Now sometimes Nietzsche means what we have said above—the ideal or goal is the creation of great individuals. We have had such great personalities all through history and we shall always have them. Only, their appearance has been more or less accidental, and we should and can produce the conditions favorable to their appearance. At other times, however, our thinker means by the overman a new type of man, a new species in the Darwinian sense, as it were a higher, better, finer species. This type is to take the place of the man that is, just as the man that is has taken the place of the brute. "Man is a rope between the brute and the overman, he is not an end or goal, but a bridge. Upward goes our way, from the species to the over-species." "I teach you the overman," says Zarathustra. "Man is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings thus far have created something beyond themselves, and you desire to be the ebb of this great flow and to return to the brute rather than to overcome man? What is the ape for man? A mockery and a painful shame. And just that, man shall be for the overman: a mockery and a painful shame. You have made the way from worm to man, and there is much of worm within you still. Once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any ape. See, I teach you the overman. The overman is the purpose of the earth. May your will say: let the overman be the purpose of the earth." "My heart is wrapped up in the overman; he is my first and only care—and not man, not my neighbor, not the poorest one, not the great sufferer, not the best. Oh my brothers, what I can love in man is that he is a transition and will pass away."

Here the overman is conceived as a higher, grander, nobler race of men, in comparison with whom our present-day men are as pigmies to giants. Our task is to hasten the coming of the overman. The overman will come, the goal will be realized; only we must not leave his coming to chance. "Could you create a God?" Zarathustra asks. "Then do not talk to me about gods! But you could create the overman. Not you perhaps yourselves, my brothers. But you could transform yourselves into the fathers and forefathers of the overman: and let this be your greatest work."

The ideal then for Nietzsche is the will for power, the will for strong, healthy life as it manifests itself in the great individuals or in a strong race or type of future men. If that is our ideal, if that is what we desire, then we must also desire everything that this ideal implies. Now life is not an easy thing, it is fundamentally and necessarily hard. "Life," says Nietzsche, "is essentially appropriation, injury and overthrow of foreign and weaker elements, oppression, hardness, the forcing of one's own forms upon others, the incorporation and at least exploitation, to put it mildly, of foreign elements.