This preaching of Superman might be called Messianic. It is the bold faith that we are not the last word of the Word of life; it is the glad hope that the best treasures, the greatest deeds, the supreme goals of humankind are still in the future. Nietzsche's message is a breath of spring blowing over the land proclaiming the advent of an issue from the womb of time of something greater, better than anything we have been, than anything we have called good or great; the advent of a new day when our best songs now will be our worst then; our noblest thoughts now our basest then; our highest achievements now, our poorest by-products then. We shall usher in that day; superman shall be our will, our deed! Superman gives our life worth. Ours is the new, exhilarating responsibility, swallowing up and nullifying all the petty responsibilities which fret us today. We have to justify our lives to that great future, to that coming one, to our children. They, through us, must be greater, better, freer, than all of us put together. We are worth our contribution to the achievement of future man. Nay, only superman can justify the history of the cosmos! Consider pre-human and sub-human life, red in tooth and claw; consider human life, often not much better and sometimes much worse; consider ourselves, our meanness and our mediocrity. Is this all? Is this warrant for the long human and pre-human story? Can you escape the conviction that but for superman the eternal gestation and agony of cosmic maternity admits of no rational vindication? Breed, then, with a view of breeding supermen. Marriage? Let this be not for ease, not for the propagation of yourselves; the pushing of yourselves into your children, parents, but for the creation of something new, of superman! Education? Not to assimilate the children to us, to the past, but to free them from us; not _Vaterland_, but _Kinderland_, must be our concern. Children shall not "sit at our feet" but stand upon our shoulders, that they may have a freer and broader sweep of the horizon. And in our children we shall love the Coming One, prepare the way for Superman, that free, great man who shall have conquered present petty man with all his slave instincts! Such, at all events, are the dreams of the great poetic and prophetic philosopher of the German Fatherland of today. All great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures.--Nietzsche in _Beyond Good and Evil_. Plato will always be an object of admiration and reverence to men who would rather see vast images of uncertain objects reflected from illuminated clouds, than representations of things in their just proportions, measurable, tangible, and convertible to household use.--Walter Savage Landor in _Imaginary Conversations_, Vol. 2. Cultivation will breed in any man a certainty of the uncertainty of his most assured convictions.--Samuel Butler in _Life and Habit_.