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
and Assyria. The true superman comes not as the tremendous personal
entry of a star, but in the less dramatic form of a general increase of
goodwill and skill and common sense. A species rises not by thrusting up
peaks but by the brimming up as a flood does. The coming of the superman
means not an epidemic of personages but the disappearance of the
Personage in the universal ascent. That is the point overlooked by the
megalomaniac school of Nietzsche and Shaw.

And it is the peculiarity of this war, it is the most reassuring
evidence that a great increase in general ability and critical ability
has been going on throughout the last century, that no isolated
great personages have emerged. Never has there been so much ability,
invention, inspiration, leadership; but the very abundance of good
qualities has prevented our focusing upon those of any one individual.
We all play our part in the realisation of God's sanity in the world,
but, as the strange, dramatic end of Lord Kitchener has served to remind
us, there is no single individual of all the allied nations whose death
can materially affect the great destinies of this war.

In the last few years I have developed a religious belief that has
become now to me as real as any commonplace fact. I think that mankind
is still as it were collectively dreaming and hardly more awakened to
reality than a very young child. It has these dreams that we express by
the flags of nationalities and by strange loyalties and by irrational
creeds and ceremonies, and its dreams at times become such nightmares as
this war. But the time draws near when mankind will awake and the dreams
will fade away, and then there will be no nationality in all the world
but humanity, and no kind,