The fact suggests the thought that nature is secretly against the
superman, and seeks to prevent his birth. We have, indeed, no
ground for assuming that the continued progress visualized by man
is in actual accord with the great flow of the elemental forces.
Devolution is quite as natural as evolution, and may be just as
pleasing, or even a good deal more pleasing, to God. If the average
man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or
Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of
him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain.
The universe seems to be in a conspiracy to encourage the endless
reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a subtle and
mysterious opposition stands eternally against the reproduction of
philosophers.


Per corollary, it is notorious that women of merit frequently marry
second-rate men, and bear them children, thus aiding in the war
upon progress. One is often astonished to discover that the wife of
some sordid and prosaic manufacturer or banker or professional
man is a woman of quick intelligence and genuine charm, with
intellectual interests so far above his comprehension that he is
scarcely so much as aware of them. Again, there are the leading
feminists, women artists and other such captains of the sex; their
husbands are almost always inferior men, and sometimes downright
fools. But not paupers! Not incompetents in a man's world! Not
bad husbands! What we here encounter, of course, is no more than
a fresh proof of the sagacity of women. The first-rate woman is a