1374 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



co-operation, and so next turn to their better organisation and 

 guidance, there is little fear but that the world-crop of supermen 

 may be increased and improved. And why not even here and there 

 stabilised, by eugenic and other agencies as well? 



In short, then, the Superman is within us, however imprisoned; 

 it is his arrest that we need most of all to inquire into; for our 

 brains are much larger than we yet use. So our children's hands are 

 more adaptive than we know: thus the recent emancipation from 

 standardised mis-instruction methods is clearl\^ proving that most 

 children have been restrained from being true artists. And as their 

 hearts too are here and there set free from the chilling individualism 

 still so firmly imposed on most of them, what growth of fellowship, 

 and thence of individuality as well! Why not even to "la politique 

 de bonne humeur", i.e. towards gentle, peaceful, and yet intensive 

 and extensive, transformations of our existing confusions and 

 hostilities, and towards better, fuller, and higher phases of social 

 life. In such ways then, the apparently remote and difficult advent 

 of the superman ma^^ be accelerated. Above all, by the release of 

 latencies as yet too generally repressed; though necessarily with 

 self-discipline as well; and social encouragement too, instead of 

 present hindrances and restraints. Such needed changes and oppor- 

 tunities are matter for social studies and initiatives; but enough 

 here if we see grounds for reasonable hope and endeavour towards 

 practical furtherance of developing individualities, and in the 

 service of social evolution; and these as its leaders, and not as 

 master-castes restraining it. If so, it is thus open to us as evolu- 

 tionists, thinking towards a world of hopes anew, to imagine them 

 as boldly as have our predecessors, even to Parnassolympians in 

 Eutopia, or such yet higher imagery and aspirations as may be. 

 And why not even discuss lines of action towards realising these? 

 Are not some of them before our eyes? 



Yet not to leave this question of the superman on Utopian 

 levels, or of merely individual and bio-social suggestions, we may 

 now turn to the current literature we put aside at the outset, and 

 make brief citation from an American artist in letters, living and 

 thinking, as sympathetic critic, in the varied modern art-effort- 

 centre of Paris. Hear then his claim, and call too of evocation, of 

 the superman, in and as the super-artist: 



The artist, in my conception of him, is the most severely responsible 

 of men. More and more, as superstitions and theologies fade, he becomes 

 the chosen mediator between man and that totality of human experience 

 without which the spirit withers. The artist becomes priest. The great 

 artist always has been one. The artist seeks the way, lives his truth 

 creatively, moulds life anew. If he does not keep step with his fellow men, 

 it is, as Thoreau has finely said, "because he hears a different drummer". 



Or if the above seems still Utopian — as vital thought in our still 



