And now, again, at the risk of being monotonous, I must point to yet another difference between Nietzsche and the prevailing school of evolutionists. Whereas the latter, in their unscrupulous optimism, believed that out of the chaotic play of blind forces something highly desirable and "good" would ultimately be evolved; whereas they tacitly, though not avowedly, believed that their "fittest" in the struggle for existence would eventually prove to be the best--in fact that we should "muddle through" to perfection somehow, and that something really noble and important would be sure to result from John Brown's contest with Harry Smith for the highest place in an insurance office, for instance; Nietzsche disbelieved from the bottom of his heart in this chance play of blind and meaningless tendencies. He said: Given a degenerate, mean, and base environment and the fittest to survive therein will be the man who is best adapted to degeneracy, meanness, and baseness--therefore the worst kind of man. Given a community of parasites, and it may be that the flattest, the slimiest, and the softest, will be the fittest to survive. Such faith in blind forces Nietzsche regarded merely as the survival of the old Christian belief in the moral order of things, fogged out in scientific apparel to suit modern tastes. He saw plainly, that if man were to be elevated at all, no blind struggle in his present conditions would ever effect that end; for the present conditions themselves make those the fittest to survive in them who are persons of absolutely undesirable gifts and propensities. He declared (and here we are in the very heart of Nietzscheism) that nothing but a total change in these conditions, a complete transvaluation of all values, would ever alter man and make him more worthy of his past. For it is values, values, and again values, that mould men, and rear men, and create men; and ignoble values make ignoble men, and noble values make noble men! Thus it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, truth without end--for men. Nietzsche realised "all that could still be made out of man, through a favourable accumulation and augmentation of human powers and arrangements"; he knew "how unexhausted man still is for the greatest possibilities, and how often in the past the type man has stood in mysterious and dangerous crossways, and has launched forth upon the right or the wrong road, impelled merely by a whim, or by a hint from the giant Chance."[16] And now, he was determined that, whether man wished to listen or not, at least he should be told of the ultimate disaster that awaited him, if he continued in his present direction. For, there was yet time!