but would such a change be tolerated if man must rise above himself to desire it? it would, through his misconception of its nature. man does desire an ideal superman with such energy as he can spare from his nutrition, and has in every age magnified the best living substitute for it he can find. his least incompetent general is set up as an alexander; his king is the first gentleman in the world; his pope is a saint. he is never without an array of human idols who are all nothing but sham supermen. that the real superman will snap his superfingers at all man’s present trumpery ideals of right, duty, honor, justice, religion, even decency, and accept moral obligations beyond present human endurance, is a thing that contemporary man does not foresee: in fact he does not notice it when our casual supermen do it in his very face. he actually does it himself every day without knowing it. he will therefore make no objection to the production of a race of what he calls great men or heroes, because he will imagine them, not as true supermen, but as himself endowed with infinite brains, infinite courage, and infinite money.
the most troublesome opposition will arise from the general fear of mankind that any interference with our conjugal customs will be an interference with our pleasures and our romance. this fear, by putting on airs of offended morality, has always intimidated people who have not measured its essential weakness; but it will prevail with those degenerates only in whom the instinct of fertility has faded into a mere itching for pleasure. the modern devices for combining pleasure with sterility, now universally known and accessible, enable these persons to weed themselves out of the race, a process already vigorously at work; and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means the survival of the partizans of the superman; for what is proposed is nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the evolutionary process.1 even if this selective agency had not been invented, the purpose of the race would still shatter the opposition of individual instincts. not only do the bees and the ants satisfy their reproductive and parental instincts vicariously; but marriage itself successfully imposes celibacy on millions of unmarried normal men and women. in short, the individual instinct in this matter, overwhelming as it is thoughtlessly supposed to be, is really a finally negligible one.
