Friedrich Nietzsche

It seems that in or­der to in­scribe them­selves upon the heart of hu­man­ity with ever­last­ing claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enorm­ous and awe-in­spir­ing ca­ri­ca­tures:

he wishes himself to gather the fruit from the tree that he plants and consequently he no longer plants those trees which require centuries of constant cultivation and are destined to afford shade to generation after generation in the future.

Whether we call it “civil­iz­a­tion,” or “hu­man­ising,” or “pro­gress,” which now dis­tin­guishes the European, whether we call it simply, without praise or blame, by the polit­ical for­mula the demo­cratic move­ment in Europe—be­hind all the moral and polit­ical fore­grounds poin­ted to by such for­mu­las, an im­mense physiolo­gical pro­cess goes on, which is ever ex­tend­ing the pro­cess of the as­sim­il­a­tion of Europeans, their in­creas­ing de­tach­ment from the con­di­tions un­der which, cli­mat­ic­ally and hered­it­ar­ily, united races ori­gin­ate, their in­creas­ing in­de­pend­ence of every def­in­ite mi­lieu, that for cen­tur­ies would fain in­scribe it­self with equal de­mands on soul and body—that is to say, the slow emer­gence of an es­sen­tially su­per­na­tional and no­madic spe­cies of man, who pos­sesses, physiolo­gic­ally speak­ing, a max­imum of the art and power of ad­apt­a­tion as his typ­ical dis­tinc­tion. This pro­cess of the evolving European, which can be re­tarded in its tempo by great re­lapses, but will per­haps just gain and grow thereby in vehe­mence and depth—the still-ra­ging storm and stress of “na­tional sen­ti­ment” per­tains to it, and also the an­arch­ism which is ap­pear­ing at present—this pro­cess will prob­ably ar­rive at res­ults on which its na­ive propag­at­ors and pan­egyr­ists, the apostles of “mod­ern ideas,” would least care to reckon. The same new con­di­tions un­der which on an av­er­age a lev­el­ling and me­diocrising of man will take place—a use­ful, in­dus­tri­ous, vari­ously ser­vice­able, and clever gregari­ous man—are in the highest de­gree suit­able to give rise to ex­cep­tional men of the most dan­ger­ous and at­tract­ive qual­it­ies. For, while the ca­pa­city for ad­apt­a­tion, which is every day try­ing chan­ging con­di­tions, and be­gins a new work with every gen­er­a­tion, al­most with every dec­ade, makes the power­ful­ness of the type im­possible; while the col­lect­ive im­pres­sion of such fu­ture Europeans will prob­ably be that of nu­mer­ous, talk­at­ive, weak-willed, and very handy work­men who re­quire a mas­ter, a com­mander, as they re­quire their daily bread; while, there­fore, the demo­crat­ising of Europe will tend to the pro­duc­tion of a type pre­pared for slavery in the most subtle sense of the term: the strong man will ne­ces­sar­ily in in­di­vidual and ex­cep­tional cases, be­come stronger and richer than he has per­haps ever been be­fore—ow­ing to the un­pre­ju­diced­ness of his school­ing, ow­ing to the im­mense vari­ety of prac­tice, art, and dis­guise. I meant to say that the demo­crat­ising of Europe is at the same time an in­vol­un­tary ar­range­ment for the rear­ing of tyr­ants—tak­ing the word in all its mean­ings, even in its most spir­itual sense.