NEO-DARWINIAN SOCIOLOGISTS 81 
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 eff- 
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 life. He was born in 1844 
into the home of a Lutheran pastor of Récken. Bereft of his 
father at four years of age, he, with two sisters, was brought up in 
the companionship of four pious women. 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. to f. 
