Chapter LVII
.). For the present let it suffice for us to know that he
accepted the “Development Hypothesis” as an explanation of the origin of species: but he did not halt where most naturalists have halted. He by no means regarded man as the highest possible being which evolution could arrive at; for though his physical development may have reached its limit, this is not the case with his mental or spiritual attributes. If the process be a fact; if things have BECOME what they are, then, he contends, we may describe no limit to man’s aspirations. If he struggled up from barbarism, and still more remotely from the lower Primates, his ideal should be to surpass man himself and reach Superman (see especially the Prologue).
(D.) Nietzsche and Sociology.
Nietzsche as a sociologist aims at an aristocratic arrangement of society. He would have us rear an ideal race. Honest and truthful in intellectual matters, he could not even think that men are equal. “With these preachers of equality will I not be mixed up and confounded. For thus speaketh justice unto ME: ‘Men are not equal.’” He sees precisely in this inequality a purpose to be served, a condition to be exploited. “Every elevation of the type ‘man,’” he writes in “Beyond Good and Evil”, “has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society—and so will it always be—a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings.”
Those who are sufficiently interested to desire to read his own detailed account of the society he would fain establish, will find an excellent passage in Aphorism 57 of “The Antichrist”.
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## PART I. THE PROLOGUE.
In Part I. including the Prologue, no very great difficulties will appear. Zarathustra’s habit of designating a whole class of men or a whole school of thought by a single fitting nickname may perhaps lead to a little confusion at first; but, as a rule, when the general drift of his arguments is grasped, it requires but a slight effort of the imagination to discover whom he is referring to. In the ninth paragraph of the Prologue, for instance, it is quite obvious that “Herdsmen” in the verse “Herdsmen, I say, etc., etc.,” stands for all those to-day who are the advocates of gregariousness—of the ant-hill. And when our author says: “A robber shall Zarathustra be called by the herdsmen,” it is clear that these words may be taken almost literally from one whose ideal was the rearing of a higher aristocracy. Again, “the good and just,” throughout the book, is the expression used in referring to the self-righteous of modern times,—those who are quite sure that they know all that is to be known concerning good and evil, and are satisfied that the values their little world of tradition has handed down to them, are destined to rule mankind as long as it lasts.
In the last paragraph of the Prologue, verse 7, Zarathustra gives us a foretaste of his teaching concerning the big and the little sagacities, expounded subsequently. He says he would he were as wise as his serpent; this desire will be found explained in the discourse entitled “The Despisers of the Body”, which I shall have occasion to refer to later.
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THE DISCOURSES.
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