usand years."

All Zarathustra's views, as also his personality, were early conceptions
of my brother's mind. Whoever reads his posthumously published writings
for the years 1869-82 with care, will constantly meet with passages
suggestive of Zarathustra's thoughts and doctrines. For instance, the
ideal of the Superman is put forth quite clearly in all his writings
during the years 1873-75; and in "We Philologists", the following
remarkable observations occur:--

"How can one praise and glorify a nation as a whole?--Even among the
Greeks, it was the INDIVIDUALS that counted."

"The Greeks are interesting and extremely important because they reared
such a vast number of great individuals. How was this possible? The
question is one which ought to be studied.

"I am interested only in the relations of a people to the rearing of
the individual man, and among the Greeks the conditions were unusually
favourable for the development of the individual; not by any means owing
to the goodness of the people, but because of the struggles of their
evil instincts.

"WITH THE HELP OF FAVOURABLE MEASURES GREAT INDIVIDUALS MIGHT BE REARED
WHO WOULD BE BOTH DIFFERENT FROM AND HIGHER THAN THOSE WHO HERETOFORE
HAVE OWED THEIR EXISTENCE TO MERE CHANCE. Here we may still be hopeful:
in the rearing of exceptional men."

The notion of rearing the Superman is only a new form of an ideal
Nietzsche already had in his youth, that "THE OBJECT OF MANKIND SHOULD
LIE IN ITS HIGHEST INDIVIDUALS" (or, as he writes in "Schopenhauer as
Educator": "Mankind ought constantly to be striving to produce great
men--this and nothing else is its duty.") But the ideals he most revered
in those days are no longer held to be the highest types of men. No,
around this future ideal of a coming humanity--the Superman--the poet
spread the veil of becoming. Who can tell to what glorious heights man
can still ascend? That is why, after having tested the worth of our
noblest ideal--that of the Saviour, in the light of the new valuations,
the poet cries with passionate emphasis in "Zarathustra":

"Never yet hath there been a Superman. Naked have I seen both of them,
the greatest and the smallest man:--

All-too-similar are they still to each other. Verily even the greatest
found I--all-too-human!"--

The phrase "the rearing of the Superman," has very often been
misunderstood. By the word "rearing," in this case, is meant the act of
modifying by means of new and highe