The Superman has always been with us, in somewhat varying types. From Alexander the Great to Napoleon, and before and after, he adorns the pages of history. Attila, among others, may enter his claim to consideration. It remains for the serious student of ethics to estimate scientifically his value as an ethical ideal, and to judge how far this type of character may profitably be taken as a pattern. Nietzsche stands at the farthest possible remove from Hegel. Does he, as an individualist, stand within hail of Kant? It scarcely seems so. When we examine Kant's "practical reason," in other words, the moral law as it revealed itself to Kant, we find that it had taken up into itself the moral development of the ages preceding. Kant's practical reason, his conscience, to speak plain English, was not the practical reason of, for example, Aristotle. The latter could speak of a slave as an "animated tool," and could believe there were men intended by nature for slavery. Kant could not. In theory an individualist, the Sage of Konigsberg stands, in reality, not far from Hegel. He does not break with the past. But Nietzsche is revolt incarnate. PART VIII THE ETHICS OF THE SOCIAL WILL CHAPTER XXX ASPECTS OF THE ETHICS OF REASON 139. THE DOCTRINE SUPPORTED BY THE OTHER SCHOOLS.--- I urge the more confidently the Ethics of Reason, or the Ethics of the Rational Social Will, because there is so little in it that is really new. It only makes articulate what we all know already, and strives to get rid of certain exaggerations into which many men who reason, and who reason well, have unwittingly fallen. The fundamentals of the doctrine have been exhibited in Parts V and VI of this volume, and the exaggerations alluded to have been treated in Part VII. Hence, I may speak very briefly in indicating how the Ethics of Reason finds a many-sided support in schools which appear, on the surface, to be in the opposition. It is evident, to begin with, that the Ethics of the Social Will cannot dispense with Moral Intuitions, but must regard them as indispensable; as, indeed, the very foundation of the moral life. That the individual may, and if he is properly equipped for the task, ought, to examine critically his own moral intuitions and those of the community in which he finds himself, and should, with becoming modesty and hesitation, now and then suggest an innovation, means no more than that he and the community are not dead, but are living, and that progress is a possibility, at least.