if there were no god, said the eighteenth century deist, it would be necessary to invent him. now this xviii century god was deus ex machina, the god who helped those who could not help themselves, the god of the lazy and incapable. the nineteenth century decided that there is indeed no such god; and now man must take in hand all the work that he used to shirk with an idle prayer. he must, in effect, change himself into the political providence which he formerly conceived as god; and such change is not only possible, but the only sort of change that is real. the mere transfiguration of institutions, as from military and priestly dominance to commercial and scientific dominance, from commercial dominance to proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom, from serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to republicanism, from polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to atheism, from atheism to pantheistic humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to general literacy, from romance to realism, from realism to mysticism, from metaphysics to physics, are all but changes from tweedledum to tweedledee: plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. but the changes from the crab apple to the pippin, from the wolf and fox to the house dog, from the charger of henry v to the brewer’s draught horse and the race-horse, are real; for here man has played the god, subduing nature to his intention, and ennobling or debasing life for a set purpose. and what can be done with a wolf can be done with a man. if such monsters as the tramp and the gentleman can appear as mere by-products of man’s individual greed and folly, what might we not hope for as a main product of his universal aspiration?
this is no new conclusion. the despair of institutions, and the inexorable “ye must be born again,” with mrs poyser’s stipulation, “and born different,” recurs in every generation. the cry for the superman did not begin with nietzsche, nor will it end with his vogue. but it has always been silenced by the same question: what kind of person is this superman to be? you ask, not for a super-apple, but for an eatable apple; not for a superhorse, but for a horse of greater draught or velocity. neither is it of any use to ask for a superman: you must furnish a specification of the sort of man you want. unfortunately you do not know what sort of man you want. some sort of goodlooking philosopher-athlete, with a handsome healthy woman for his mate, perhaps.
vague as this is, it is a great advance on the popular demand for a perfect gentleman and a perfect lady. and, after all, no market demand in the world takes the form of exact technical specification of the article required. excellent poultry and potatoes are produced to satisfy the demand of housewives who do not know the technical differences between a tuber and a chicken. they will tell you that the proof of the pudding is in the eating; and they are right. the proof of the superman will be in the living; and we shall find out how to produce him by the old method of trial and error, and not by waiting for a completely convincing prescription of his ingredients.
certain common and obvious mistakes may be ruled out from the beginning. for example, we agree that we want superior mind; but we need not fall into the football club folly of counting on this as a product of superior body. yet if we recoil so far as to conclude that superior mind consists in being the dupe of our ethical classifications of virtues and vices, in short, of conventional morality, we shall fall out of the fryingpan of the football club into the fire of the sunday school. if we must choose between a race of athletes and a race of “good” men, let us have the athletes: better samson and milo than calvin and robespierre. but neither alternative is worth changing for: samson is no more a superman than calvin. what then are we to do?
