inition of it as the will to secure power.

In adaptation, imitation certainly plays a great role, but individual
exercise of power is just as important. Through adaptation life attains
a fixed form; through exercise of power, new factors.

Thoughtful people, as I have already stated, talk a good deal about
personality. But they are, nevertheless, filled with doubts when their
children are not just like all other children; when they cannot show in
their offspring all the ready-made virtues required by society. And so
they drill their children, repressing in childhood the natural instincts
which will have freedom when they are grown. People still hardly realise
how new human beings are formed; therefore the old types constantly
repeat themselves in the same circle,--the fine young men, the sweet
girls, the respectable officials, and so on. And new types with
higher ideals,--travellers on unknown paths, thinkers of yet unthought
thoughts, people capable of the crime of inaugurating new ways,--such
types rarely come into existence among those who are well brought up.

Nature herself, it is true, repeats the main types constantly. But she
also constantly makes small deviations. In this way different species,
even of the human race, have come into existence. But man himself does
not yet see the significance of this natural law in his own higher
development. He wants the feelings, thoughts, and judgments already
stamped with approval to be reproduced by each new generation. So we get
no new individuals, but only more or less prudent, stupid, amiable, or
bad-tempered examples of the genus man. The still living instincts
of the ape, double, in the case of man, the effect of heredity.
Conservatism is for the present stronger in mankind than the effort to
produce new types. But this last characteristic is the most valuable.
The educator should do anything but advise the child to do what
everybody does. He should rather rejoice when he sees in the child
tendencies to deviation. Using other people's opinion as a standard
results in subordinating one's self to their will. So we become a part
of the great mass, led by the Superman through the strength of his will,
a will which could not have mastered strong personalities. It has been
justly remarked that individual peoples, like the English, have attained
the greatest political and social freedom, because the personal feeling
of independence is far in excess of freedom in a legal fo