Isaiah, with his doctrine of the survival of a remnant. The question is, what is to be selected? Nature does not do so very ill herself, and, in Nietzsche's estimation, is not to be set down as unmoral because she is without pity for the degenerate;[1] and yet man with clear vision might do better than nature, and avoid her enormous waste—he might, substitute purposive selection for natural selection and intelligently aim at what she is blindly groping for, or at least making possible.[2] The aim which Nietzsche suggests is that organic aim, culminating in something transcendent, which I have hinted at. It springs from a love that looks far away, and conquers and transcends pity. "Spare not thy neighbor. Man [present man] is something that must be surpassed."[3]
Just how the selective process is to be carried out in detail Nietzsche does not tell us—there is no systematic or special treatment of the subject. He hints at the segregation of undesirable elements."[4] He tells the story of a saint who recommended a father to kill a misshapen, sickly child, and who, when reproached with cruelty, said, "Is it not more cruel to allow it to live?"[5] He urges a new and more sacred conception of marriage. Are you a man, Zarathustra says, who dare wish for himself a child? Are you a victorious one, a self conqueror, master of your senses, lord of your virtues? Not only onward shall you propagate yourself, but upward. Marriage: so call I the will of two to create one who is more than they who created him.[6] Those with only cattle-like dispositions in their bodies, it is elsewhere stated, should not have the right to marry.[7] Stern and exacting as all this sounds, Nietzsche is not conscious of any real inhumanity.[8] While he would not have the higher, stronger types leave their own tasks to tend the sickly, he has so little idea of wishing to put an end to
- ↑ Will to Power, § 52.
- ↑ Werke, XII, 123-4, § 243: 191, § 408.
- ↑ Zarathustra, III, xii, § 4; cf. prologue, § 3; also I, x; and Werke, XIV, 72, § 140.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 17; Genealogy etc., III, § 26.
- ↑ Joyful Science, § 73.
- ↑ Zarathustra, I, xx.
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 72, § 119. Cf. as to the chronic sick and neurasthenics, Will to Power, § 734.
- ↑ Cf. the picture of future "humanity," Joyful Science, § 337 (particularly the close of the paragraph).
