War and the Future | Page 7

coin, whose merits were a little flawed by a
childish and dangerous ambition to run over every cat he saw upon the
road, I talked to de Tessin about this big blue-coated figure of Joffre,
which is not so much a figure as a great generalisation of certain
hitherto rather obscured French qualities, and of the impression he had
made upon me. And from that I went on to talk about the Super Man,
for this encounter had suddenly crystallised out a set of realisations that
had been for some time latent in my mind.
How much of what follows I said to de Tessin at the time I do not
clearly remember, but this is what I had in mind.
The idea of the superman is an idea that has been developed by various
people ignorant of biology and unaccustomed to biological ways of
thinking. It is an obvious idea that follows in the course of half an hour
or so upon one's realisation of the significance of Darwinism. If man
has evolved from something different, he must now be evolving
onward into something sur- human. The species in the future will be
different from the species of the past. So far at least our Nietzsches and
Shaws and so on went right.
But being ignorant of the elementary biological proposition that
modification of a species means really a secular change in its average,
they jumped to a conclusion--to which the late Lord Salisbury also
jumped years ago at a very memorable British Association
meeting--that a species is modified by the sudden appearance of
eccentric individuals here and there in the general mass who
interbreed--preferentially. Helped by a streak of antic egotism in
themselves, they conceived of the superman as a posturing personage,
misunderstood by the vulgar, fantastic, wonderful. But the antic
Personage, the thing I have called the Effigy, is not new but old, the
oldest thing in history, the departing thing. It depends not upon the
advance of the species but upon the uncritical hero-worship of the
crowd. You may see the monster drawn twenty times the size of
common men upon the oldest monuments of Egypt and Assyria. The
true superman comes not as the tremendous personal entry of a star, but
in the less dramatic form of a general increase of goodwill and skill and

common sense. A species rises not by thrusting up peaks but by the
brimming up as a flood does. The coming of the superman means not
an epidemic of personages but the disappearance of the Personage in
the universal ascent. That is the point overlooked by the megalomaniac
school of Nietzsche and Shaw.
And it is the peculiarity of this war, it is the most reassuring evidence
that a great increase in general ability and critical ability has been going
on throughout the last century, that no isolated great personages have
emerged. Never has there been so much ability, invention, inspiration,
leadership; but the very abundance of good qualities has prevented our
focusing upon those of any one individual. We all play our part in the
realisation of God's sanity in the world, but, as the strange, dramatic
end of Lord Kitchener has served to remind us, there is no single
individual of all the allied nations whose death can materially affect the
great destinies of this war.
In the last few years I have developed a religious belief that has become
now to me as real as any commonplace fact. I think that mankind is still
as it were collectively dreaming and hardly more awakened to reality
than a very young child. It has these dreams that we express by the
flags of nationalities and by strange loyalties and by irrational creeds
and ceremonies, and its dreams at times become such nightmares as
this war. But the time draws near when mankind will awake and the
dreams will fade away, and then there will be no nationality in all the
world but humanity, and no kind, no emperor, nor leader but the one
God of mankind. This is my faith. I am as certain of this as I was in
1900 that men would presently fly. To me it is as if it must be so.
So that to me this extraordinary refusal of the allied nations under
conditions that have always hitherto produced a Great Man to produce
anything of the sort, anything that can be used as an effigy and carried
about for the crowd to follow, is a fact of extreme significance and
encouragement. It seems to me that the twilight of the half gods must
have come, that we have reached the end of the age when men needed a
Personal Figure about which they could rally. The Kaiser is perhaps the
last of that long