Page:Thus Spake Zarathustra - Alexander Tille - 1896.djvu/25

 significance ; and the history of modern evolutional utilitarianism in ethics is perhaps the most astonishing among them. If it was the last goal of mediaeval ethical speculation to find the way to heaven by fulfilling the commandments of God, another goal was, after the sixteenth century, set up the goal of so-called eudaemonistic utilitarianism. It was to be reached by furtherance of the happiness of one's fellowmen. But before it was, in this century, called by Bentham the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number, or the maximisation of happiness, it had, in German philosophy and literature been superseded by another goal, which is usually called the goal of Perfectionism. Under the influence of Greek antiquity it had become the aim of the educated man to work out his own perfection in every respect. Leibniz is the most important representative of that school, which, in the course of the eighteenth century, borrowed a whole phraseology from the world of art. It was Goethe, who, after the model of the French phrases former le cceur and former r esprit, coined the new word Bildung which later on became identical partly with culture and partly with education. He is probably the most pronounced perfectionist who has ever lived. Early in his youth he called his Faust a Beyond- Man, an Uebermensch. His aim it was to make his own life a great work of art. And yet in Wilhehn Meister's Wanderjahren he stands at the threshold of a new phase in the evolution of individual perfectionism, of the phase of racial perfectionism. This phase was opened by Prince Piickler-Muskau, who was the first to lay before his contemporaries the idea of leading the human race to a higher perfection by means of artificial selection, after the model of the breeder of animals and the father of Frederic the Great, who is said to have married by preference his tallest grenadiers to tall ladies in order to beget a still taller offspring.