who are all nothing
but sham Supermen. That the real Superman will snap his superfingers at
all Man's present trumpery ideals of right, duty, honor, justice,
religion, even decency, and accept moral obligations beyond present
human endurance, is a thing that contemporary Man does not foresee: in
fact he does not notice it when our casual Supermen do it in his very
face. He actually does it himself every day without knowing it. He
will therefore make no objection to the production of a race of what he
calls Great Men or Heroes, because he will imagine them, not as true
Supermen, but as himself endowed with infinite brains, infinite courage,
and infinite money.

The most troublesome opposition will arise from the general fear of
mankind that any interference with our conjugal customs will be an
interference with our pleasures and our romance. This fear, by putting
on airs of offended morality, has always intimidated people who have not
measured its essential weakness; but it will prevail with those
degenerates only in whom the instinct of fertility has faded into a mere
itching for pleasure. The modern devices for combining pleasure with
sterility, now universally known and accessible, enable these persons to
weed themselves out of the race, a process already vigorously at work;
and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means the
survival of the partizans of the Superman; for what is proposed is
nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost
unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious
fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the
evolutionary process.[1] Even if this selective agency had not been
invented, the purpose of the race would still shatter the opposition of
individual instincts. Not only do the bees and the ants satisfy their
reproductive and parental instincts vicariously; but marriage itself
successfully imposes celibacy on millions of unmarried normal men and
women. In short, the individual instinct in this matter, overwhelming
as it is thoughtlessly supposed to be, is really a finally negligible
one.

[1] The part played in evolution by the voluptuary will be the same as
that already played by the glutton. The glutton, as the man with the
strongest motive for nourishing himself, will always take more pains
than his fellows to get food. When food is so difficult to get that
only great exertions can secure a sufficient s