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