Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/476

 470 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

f ataliBzn^ appear not to have recognized — ^probably because the goal ia so far away — that they face toward an arifltocracy most hateful to one who knows what democracy really means. Here again Nietzsche was more far-sighted than his biological counterparts^ for he clearly saw and loudly proclaimed that supermen must be a very few very select masters with the great common  herd  their slaves.

And so our discussion turns back to its beginning. The laws of interdependence^ of reciprocal connection and action which seem to pervade all living nature and bind it into a great, infinitely complex unity are only a seeming, only an outward manifestation of the ultimate Beality, so the dominating biologists accord with Nietzscheans in declar- ing. The ^' web of life'' of which the ordinary man recognizes himself to be a part and which vulgar natural history strives to accurately de- scribe and define and to naturally classify, is of little profit or interest because unreal or at best semi-real, say oc dpurroi the aristocracy of mod- em biology.

We may hope a generation of students of nature will arise after a while, a majority of whom will genuinely believe and act in accordance with their faith, that common sense has a real part in the interpreta- tion of nature. And when such biologists come and succeed in making themselves heard and felt there may be ushered in an era of rule of the best who will be indeed best because they will rule according to the law of the whole and not by the law of some Being above or beneath or some- where else outside of nature, whether called superman or the fit, or by some other name.

It is high time that natural history should ''exert its due influence upon the current habits of philosophizing."

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