e sort of goodlooking
philosopher-athlete, with a handsome healthy woman for his mate,
perhaps.

Vague as this is, it is a great advance on the popular demand for a
perfect gentleman and a perfect lady. And, after all, no market demand
in the world takes the form of exact technical specification of the
article required. Excellent poultry and potatoes are produced to
satisfy the demand of housewives who do not know the technical
differences between a tuber and a chicken. They will tell you that the
proof of the pudding is in the eating; and they are right. The proof of
the Superman will be in the living; and we shall find out how to produce
him by the old method of trial and error, and not by waiting for a
completely convincing prescription of his ingredients.

Certain common and obvious mistakes may be ruled out from the beginning.
For example, we agree that we want superior mind; but we need not fall
into the football club folly of counting on this as a product of
superior body. Yet if we recoil so far as to conclude that superior
mind consists in being the dupe of our ethical classifications of
virtues and vices, in short, of conventional morality, we shall fall out
of the fryingpan of the football club into the fire of the Sunday
School. If we must choose between a race of athletes and a race of
"good" men, let us have the athletes: better Samson and Milo than Calvin
and Robespierre. But neither alternative is worth changing for: Samson
is no more a Superman than Calvin. What then are we to do?

II

PROPERTY AND MARRIAGE

Let us hurry over the obstacles set up by property and marriage.
Revolutionists make too much of them. No doubt it is easy to
demonstrate that property will destroy society unless society destroys
it. No doubt, also, property has hitherto held its own and destroyed
all the empires. But that was because the superficial objection to it
(that it distributes social wealth and the social labor burden in a
grotesquely inequitable manner) did not threaten the existence of the
race, but only the individual happiness of its units, and finally the
maintenance of some irrelevant political form or other, such as a
nation, an empire, or the like. Now as happiness never matters to
Nature, as she neither recognizes flags and frontiers nor cares a straw
whether the economic system adopted by a society is feudal,
capitalistic, or collectivist, provided it keeps the race afoot (the
hive and the