," and he jots down in his note book certain
suggestions, a little immature but still emitting a ray of light. "It is
absurd," he says, "to imagine that this victory or survival of values
(that is low values, values, that is, that seem to be mediocrity) can be
antibiological: we must look for an explanation in the fact that they
are probably of some vital importance to the maintenance of the type
'man' in the event of its being threatened by a preponderance of the
feeble-minded and degenerate. Perhaps if things went otherwise, man
would now be an extinct animal. The elevation of type is dangerous for
the preservation of the species. Why? _Strong races are wasteful, we
find ourselves here confronted with a problem of economy._"

We perceive, in this train of reasoning, some inkling of what Nietzsche
is trying to formulate as his solution of the difficulty. What is needed
must be a natural process, a _vis medicatrix naturae_. In the process of
declining and falling, races practise a sort of thrift; they save and
they economise. Then, if we may suppose that the quantity of energy of
intellectual and moral power, _i.e._, of "human values" at the disposal
of the race is constant, the races that so act are creating in
themselves a reserve which one day will irresistibly take shape in a
chosen class. They are creating in their own bosom an _elite_ which will
one day emerge, they have conceived all unconsciously an aristocracy
which will one day be born to be their ruler.

We always find in Nietzsche the theory of Schopenhauer, the theory of
the great deceiver who leads the human race by the nose and who makes
it do and, as if it liked it, that which it would never do if it knew
where it was being led. It is very possible; still it remains that
economy carried to an extreme, though it can lead to a reserve of force,
may also lead, and perhaps much more surely, to a condition of anaemia;
the annihilation of one set of competent people in order to prepare the
way for races of competent people in the future, I do not know if this
is a game inspired by the great deceiver, but it is a game which to me
appears dangerous. We ought to be sure (and who is sure?) that the great
deceiver does not abandon those who abandon themselves.

I have often said, without thinking of any metaphysical mythology,
thinking indeed of the ambitious people whom we meet everywhere, and
thinking only of giving them some good advice: "The best way to get
t