NEO-DARWINIAN SOCIOLOGISTS 8 1 



4. That the human race should endeavor to make its mastery 

 over its environment more and more certain, and that it is its 

 destiny, therefore, to widen more and more the gap which now 

 separates it from the lower races of animals. 



5. That any code of morality which retains its permanence and 

 authority after the conditions of existence which gave rise to it 

 have changed, works against this upward progress of mankind 

 toward greater and greater efficiency. 



6. That all gods and religions, because they have for their 

 main object the protection of moral codes against change, are 

 inimical to the life and well-being of healthy and efficient men. 



7. That all the ideas which grow out of such gods and religions 

 — such, for example, as the Christian ideas of humility, of self- 

 sacrifice and of brotherhood, — are enemies of life, too. 



8. That human beings of the ruling, efficient class should reject 

 all gods and religions, and with them the morality at the bottom 

 of them and the ideas which grow out of them, and restore to its 

 ancient kingship that primal instinct which enables every effi- 

 cient individual to differentiate between the things which are 

 beneficial to him and the things which are harmful. 



This analysis would seem to indicate that Nietzsche should be 

 classified rather among those who have contributed chiefly to the 

 development of the doctrine of active adaptation, but his phi- 

 losophy is rooted fundamentally on two assumptions: The will 

 to live as the primary element in human life, and the development, 

 by the law of struggle and survival, of the super-man in whom this 

 will to live shall find the highest possible expression. 



We shall concern ourselves here chiefly with the second of these 

 fundamental elements. 



One can understand the evolution of Nietzsche's system only 

 in the light of his temperament and fife. He was born in 1844 

 into the home of a Lutheran pastor of Rocken. Bereft of his 

 father at four years of age, he, with two sisters, was brought up in 

 the companionship of four pious women. 1 The idol of the home, 

 now changed to Naumburg-on-the-Saale, " the boy shrank from 

 the touch of the world's rough hand," until he entered the Gym- 

 1 The Philosophy of Nietzsche, pp. 10 f. 



