The passage is not without a hint of Nietzsche’s personal psychology. No doubt he loved contrast for the sake of contrast; no doubt he loved drama--particularly the dramatic conflict of ideas--for the play’s sake; no doubt he loved paradox not a little for its noise. Yet it is not hard for the student to make out motives deeper than the personal, and more general, that impelled Nietzsche to turn his eyes from the ethics of self-sacrifice to the opposite ideal, to the ideal of “the most living, the most aggressive of men,” to the ideal of the “Caesarian Conqueror.” * * * * * No understanding of these motives can leave out of account the great scientific idea that had made its appearance in the nineteenth century--the idea of organic evolution. It is difficult to overestimate the suggestion that would lie in such an idea for one imbued with the thought of Schopenhauer. In its Darwinian form, the essential mechanism of evolution is seen to be a struggle, a war between race and race, between individual and individual. That such warfare is the necessary expression of the will to live, the most universal principle of that troubled phenomenon we call nature, Schopenhauer had indeed grasped, had insisted upon, had made the cornerstone of his theory of life. But then Schopenhauer had dwelt with equal insistence on the uselessness, the irrationality of the struggle. It was all cruel, then, nowhere benign, because nowhere directed toward an end. But now a purpose in the struggle is just what the evolutionary hypothesis seems to suggest. What if life’s pitiless cruelty were justified as the indispensable means to a supreme end--the end namely of producing a being higher than any of those that take part in it? By the selection of the fittest, would not this warfare result in the production of the superior? And if the superior could be produced only at the cost of the inferior, is there not in this sacrifice something more than wanton and irrational cruelty? It is little wonder that one already impressed with the “self-contradiction” involved in a will not to live should seize upon this suggestion. “I bring you a goal,” cries Zarathustra. And this goal he calls the “Uebermensch.” “I preach to you the Superman. Man is something to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? “All things before you have produced something beyond themselves, and would you be the ebb of this great flood? Would you rather go back to the animal than overcome man? “What is the ape to man? A jest or a bitter shame. And just that shall man be to the Superman, a jest or a bitter shame. “You have traveled the way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm.... “Lo, I preach to you the Superman. “The Superman is the meaning of the earth.” * * * * *