Life is a struggle, but not necessarily a struggle toward the better, as the idealists imagine. Though a fairly good Darwinian, Dreiser would fain believe in the survival of the fittest. War does not ever make for better. It slaughters blindly left and right, and the bravest, the most daring and courageous are always the first to die, as the World War proved not long ago. Dreiser’s supermen are a product of change, human machines moved by vices and passions, greed and lust. They may win over their fellow mortals, but they have to cope with Nature, Nature without an Emersonian Oversoul, and all of them surrender finally to its blind dictates. The man who wrote “The Titan,” “The Financier,” “The Genius” hit the hardest blow to American idealism. He might well be nicknamed the Homer of the heroes who fail, the Balzac of moral and physiological failures. But an artist does not much care to know where the world goes; he is chiefly concerned with life and motion. Where there is struggle there is life and motion and rhythm, and this it is which makes the world artistically interesting and attractive, and it does this for Dreiser. Even from the utilitarian point of view (when it is told), there is compensation in the existence of the giants. It would of course be folly on our part to try to block the way of the lion and the tiger. We had better carefully keep at a safe distance: My own guess would be that we, or rather the race, are going on to a greater individuality, plus a greater weakness as to its component and clinging atoms, providing it does not suffer an endless dark age of mass control or total extinction in some form or other. Nietzsche appeared preaching individuality, greater individuality for everybody who could achieve it, and to a certain extent he was right. Greater individuality than the world has yet seen will certainly be achieved by some.... If to have a Woolworth Building, a transcontinental railroad, a Panama Canal, a flying machine, to say nothing of literature and art, means that we must endure a man who is dull, greedy, vain, ridiculous in many ways or even an advocate of every conceivable vice in order to twist his brain into some strange phantasmagorical tendency, the result of which will be some one of these things, there are many who would enthusiastically say, “Then let us have him along with all his lacks or vices, in order that this other may be.”... For my part I am convinced that so-called vice or crime and destruction and so-called evil, are as fully a part of the universal creative process as are all the so-called virtues, and do as much good--providing, as they do, for one thing, the religionist and the moralist with their reasons for existing. At best, ethics and religion are but one face of a shield which is essentially irreligious and ethical as to its other face, or the first would not exist.[20]