The growing evolution of creatures is assumed. All grounds for this assumption are entirely lacking. Every type has its _limitations_: beyond these evolution cannot carry it. _My general point of view. First proposition_: Man as a species is _not_ progressing. Higher specimens are indeed attained; but they do not survive. The general level of the species is not raised. _Second proposition_: Man as a species does not represent any sort of progress compared with any other animal. The whole of the animal and plant world does not develop from the lower to the higher.... but all simultaneously, haphazardly, confusedly, and at variance. The richest and most complex forms--and the term "higher type" means no more than this--perish more easily: only the lowest succeed in maintaining their apparent imperishableness. The former are seldom attained, and maintain their superior position with difficulty, the latter are compensated by great fruitfulness.--In the human race, also, the _superior specimens,_ the happy cases of evolution, are the first to perish amid the fluctuations of chances for and against them. They are exposed to every form of decadence: they are extreme, and, on that account alone, already decadents.... The short duration of beauty, of genius, of the Cæsar, is _sui generis:_ such things are not hereditary. The _type_ is inherited, there is nothing extreme or particularly "happy" about a type----It is not a case of a particular fate, or of the "evil will" of Nature, but merely of the concept "superior type": the higher type is an example of an incomparably greater degree of complexity a greater sum of co-ordinated elements: but on this account disintegration becomes a thousand times more threatening. "Genius" is the sublimest machine in existence--hence it is the most fragile. _Third propositio:_: The domestication (culture) of man does not sink very deep. When it does sink far below the skin it immediately becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The wild man (or, in moral terminology, the _evil_ man) is a reversion to Nature--and, in a certain sense, he represents a recovery, a _cure_ from the effects of "culture." ... 685.