Page:Thus Spake Zarathustra - Thomas Common - 1917.djvu/16

xii could realise with all their spiritual and physical energies, provided they adopted the new values.

The author of "Zarathustra" never lost sight of that egregious example of a transvaluation of all values through Christianity, whereby the whole of the deified mode of life and thought of the Greeks, as well as strong Romedom, was almost annihilated or transvalued in a comparatively short time. Could not a rejuvenated Græco-Roman system of valuing (once it had been refined and made more profound by the schooling which two thousand years of Christianity had provided) effect another such revolution within a calculable period of time, until that glorious type of manhood shall finally appear which is to be our new faith and hope, and in the creation of which Zarathustra exhorts us to participate?

In his private notes on the subject the author uses the expression "Superman" (always in the singular, by-the-bye), as signifying "the most thoroughly well-constituted type," as opposed to "modern man"; above all, however, he designates Zarathustra himself as an example of the Superman. In "Ecce Homo" he is careful to enlighten us concerning the precursors and prerequisites to the advent of this highest type, in referring to a certain passage in "The Joyful Wisdom":—

"In order to understand this type, we must first be quite clear in regard to the leading physiological condition on which it depends: this condition is what I call great healthiness. I know not how to express my meaning more plainly or more personally than I have done already in one of the last chapters (Aphorism 382) of the fifth book of "The Joyful Wisdom":

"We, the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand,"—it says there,—"we firstlings of a yet untried future—we require for a new end also a new means, namely, a new healthiness, stronger, sharper, tougher, bolder and merrier than all healthiness hitherto. He whose soul longeth to