What is the import of this idea? Is it a reality or a symbol? It is impossible to say. Nietzsche's mind is rapid and always oscillating. The vehemence of the inspiration which carries him along leaves him neither leisure nor strength to define. He hardly succeeds in understanding the ideas which agitate him, and interprets them himself in divers ways. At times, the Superman appears to him as a very serious reality. But more often, it seems, he neglects or disdains all literal belief, and his idea is no more than a lyrical phantasy with which he trifles for the sake of animating base humanity. It is an illusion, a useful and beneficent illusion, he would say, were he still a Wagnerian, dared he to re-adopt the vocabulary of his thirtieth year. Then he had liked to repeat the maxim from Schiller: _Dare to dream and to lie._ We may believe that the Superman is chiefly the dream and falsehood of a lyrical poet. Every species has its limits which it cannot transgress. Nietzsche knows this and writes it. It was a painful labour. Friedrich Nietzsche, ill-disposed to conceive a hope, had frequent revolts against the task which he imposed on himself. Every morning on awakening from a sleep which chloral had rendered sweet, he rediscovered life with frightful bitterness. Conquered by melancholy and rancour, he wrote pages which he had at once to re-read attentively, to correct or erase. He dreaded these bad hours in which anger, seizing him like a vertigo, obscured his best thoughts. Then he would evoke his hero, Zarathustra, always noble, always serene, and seek from him some encouragement. Many a passage of his poem is the expression of this agony. Zarathustra speaks to him: "Yea: I know thy danger. But by my love and hope, I conjure thee: reject not thy love and thy hope. "The noble one is always in danger of becoming an insolent, a sneering one and a destroyer. Alas, I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope. Then they slandered all high hopes. "By my love and my hope I conjure thee; do not cast away the hero in thy soul! believe in the holiness of thy highest hope."