Man, as something final and fixed? Darwin changed Fate from a static
sphinx into a chameleon flux. Just as certainly as man has arisen from
something whose bones alone remain as reminders of his existence, we
are persuaded man himself is to be the ancestor of another creature,
differing as much from him as he from the Chimpanzi, and who, if he
will not supplant and wipe him out, will probably segregate him and
allow him to play out his existence in cage cities.

The vision of this After-man or From-man is really about as helpful to
us as the water of the oasis mirage is to the lost dying of thirst
in the desert. The outcries of the wretched and miserable, the
gray-and-dreary lived din an unmanageable tinnitus in our ears. Like
God, it may be but a large, vague idea toward which we grope to
snuggle up against. It seems implicit in the doctrines of evolution.
But how do we know that in man the spiral of life has not reached its
apex, and that now, even now, the vortices of its descent are not
beginning? How do we know that the From-man is to be a Superman and
not a Subman? How can we dare to hope that the slave-beast-brute is to
give birth to an heir, fine and free and superior?

We do not know and we have every indication and induction for the most
oppositely contrary conclusions. Life has blundered supremely, in,
while making brains its darling, forgetting or helplessly surrendering
to the egoisms of alimentation. So it has spawned a conflict between
its organs, and a consequent impasse in which the lower centres drive
the higher pitilessly into devising means and instruments for the
suicide of the whole.

As War shows plainly to the most stupidly gross imagination, the germs
of our own self-destruction as a species saturate our blood. The