earth may go on.[1] He is aware that accident more or less rules in the world, and perhaps always will—he is aware that genius itself is often a happy accident.[2] Indeed, some of his interpreters cannot clearly make out whether the superman is to be trained and educated or is to come like a piece of fate.[3] Nietzsche, however, really combines both views, saying that we may look to heredity, happy marriages, and to happy accidents to give us great men[4]—he is really a more balanced thinker than many imagine.
With this training of an aristocracy is also to go every possible measure for preventing degeneration among the mass of men. Races that cannot be utilized in some way may be allowed to die out. Sickly people and criminals may be kept from propagating themselves.[5] Nietzsche does not think much of those who talk of man's rights in marriage; it is better to speak of the right to marry, and he thinks it a rare right. Permission to produce children should be granted as a distinction—physicians' certificates being in order.[6] Women have obvious power here, and with power Nietzsche suggests responsibility. Remarking that the earth might be turned into a garden of happiness, if the dissatisfied, melancholy, grumbling could be prevented from perpetuating themselves, he intimates here "a practical philosophy for the female sex." It would also be better if men of high intellect, but with weakly nervous character, could not be perpetuated in kind. Society may hold in readiness the severest measures of restriction to this end, on occasion even castration. "The Bible commandment 'thou shalt not kill' is a naïveté compared with the commandment of life to decadents, 'thou shalt not beget.'"[7]
- ↑ Will to Power, § 960; cf. Werke, XII, 368, § 718.
- ↑ Cf. Werke, XI, 273, § 289; Will to Power, § 907.
- ↑ E.g., Dorner, op. cit., pp. 194-5.
- ↑ Will to Power, §§ 995-6.
- ↑ Werke, XI, 139, § 441 (cf. J. A. Thomson, "We do not want to eliminate bad stock by watering it with good, but by placing it under conditions where it is relatively or absolutely infertile," Heredity, p. 331); Werke, XII, 188, § 404.
- ↑ Ibid., XIV, 249, § 522; XII, 188, § 403; XIV, 248, § 518.
- ↑ Mixed Opinions etc., § 278; Werke, XIV, 263, § 10; Will to Power, § 734 (cf. XII, 196, § 418, as to what the Greeks allowed).
