7io POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



men, they alone are worth while; the little men, the weaklings, the 

 many, the all-too-many, the mediocre, the half-and-half, the common- 

 place, 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 inter- 

 vening 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 indi- 

 viduals 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 overmen, 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. Man- 

 kind 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, 



