to him it is bound up with the idea of something superhuman to come—only in this shape would he have published it: unrelieved, unrelated in this way, he would probably have allowed it to remain in the dark chambers of his own mind. Zarathustra is made to say, "I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life or a better life or a similar life; I come again eternally to this identical and selfsame life, in its greatest and also in its smallest, to teach again the eternal return of all things—to announce to men the superman."[1] The italics are mine. The two things—eternal return and superman—are interwoven in Nietzsche's mind; and no one, I imagine, will claim that this full-orbed view had ever been taught before.
On another point, however, it is difficult to acquit Nietzsche of error, and even of a certain naïveté. He entertained the idea—nay, appears to have been convinced of it—that the doctrine would make a veritable selection among men. The weaker, he believed, would not be able to stand it, they would be undone at the thought of an unending repetition of their pitiful lives, and not knowing how, or being without the energy, to transform them, they would be driven to despair and suicide. Only the strong, the brave, those capable of great things could face the doctrine with equanimity, and with this type of men surviving and occupying the earth, things would be possible, of which no utopist has as yet dreamed.[2] "It is the great disciplinary (züchtende) thought: the races that cannot endure it are doomed, those that feel it as the greatest benefit are chosen for dominion."[3] But that the relatively unreflecting and unimaginative mass of men are going to be deeply affected by something that is to happen to them ages on ages to come is most improbable; if they are not driven to suicide now by the character of their lot, a prospective renewal of it at some unknown time in the future will hardly disturb them much more deeply. In truth, Nietzsche, in thinking as he does, transfers to others quite different from himself his own imaginative intelligence; because he would suffer to despair in their place, he infers that
