PHILOSOPHY OF FBIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. 7" 



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 condi- 

 tions 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 over- 

 man," 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 neigh- 

 bor, 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 over- 

 man. Not you perhaps yourselves, my brothers. But you could trans- 

 form 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 neces- 

 sarily 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. Ex- 



