so why should
we worry about the Superman? If the Superman will come by natural
selection, may we leave it to natural selection? If the Superman will
come by human selection, what sort of Superman are we to select? If he
is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then
Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher; the only way we can work
for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merciful; sensible
advice, but hardly startling. If he is to be anything else than this,
why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? These questions
have been many times asked of the Nietzscheites, and none of the
Nietzscheites have even attempted to answer them.

The keen intellect of Bernard Shaw would, I think, certainly have seen
through this fallacy and verbiage had it not been that another important
event about this time came to the help of Nietzsche and established the
Superman on his pedestal. It is the third of the things which I have
called stepping-stones to _Man and Superman_, and it is very important.
It is nothing less than the breakdown of one of the three intellectual
supports upon which Bernard Shaw had reposed through all his confident
career. At the beginning of this book I have described the three
ultimate supports of Shaw as the Irishman, the Puritan, and the
Progressive. They are the three legs of the tripod upon which the
prophet sat to give the oracle; and one of them broke. Just about this
time suddenly, by a mere shaft of illumination, Bernard Shaw ceased to
believe in progress altogether.

It is generally implied that it was reading Plato that did it. That
philosopher was very well qualified to convey the first shock of the
ancient civilisation to Shaw, who had always thought instinctively of
civilisation as modern. This is not due merely to the daring splendour
of the speculations and the vivid picture of Athenian life, it is due
also to something analogous in the personalities of that particular
ancient Greek and this particular modern Irishman. Bernard Shaw has much
affinity to Plato--in his instinctive elevation of temper, his
courageous pursuit of ideas as far as they will go, his civic idealism;
and also, it must be confessed, in his dislike of poets and a touch of
delicate inhumanity. But whatever influence produced the change, the
change had all the dramatic suddenness and completeness which belongs to
the conversions of great men. It had been perpetually implied through
all