1. Knowledge provides a basis for activity.
2. The social atmosphere palpitates with enthusiastic resolve and abounds in noble endeavor.
3. There is work for each one to perform.
The despondent boy has thus evolved into the enthusiastic worker whose watchword is “Forward!”—forward towards a new goal, whose very existence is made attainable through the achievements of the past: a goal before which the triumphs of bygone ages pale into insignificance.
The past worked with things. Pyramids were built, cities constructed, mountains tunneled, trade augmented, fortunes amassed. Hear Ruskin’s comment on this devotion to material wealth: “Nevertheless, it is open, I repeat, to serious question, ... whether, among national manufactures, that of souls of a good quality may not at last turn out a quite lucrative one. Nay, in some far-away and yet undreamed of hour, I can even imagine that England ... as a Christian mother, may at last attain to the virtues and the treasures of a heathen one, and be able to lead forth her sons, saying: ‘These are my jewels.’”[1]
The past worked with things: the future, rising higher in the scale of civilization, must work with men—with the plastic, living clay of humanity. As Solomon long ago said, “He that ruleth his own spirit is greater than he that taketh a city.” The men of the past built cities and took them. They brought the forces of nature into subjection and remodeled the world as a living place for humanity, yet, save for a shadow in Rome and an echo from Greece, there is scarcely a trace in history of a consistent attempt to evolve nobler men.
Material objects have cost the nations untold effort, but human fiber—the life blood of nations—has been overlooked or forgotten. The world is weary of this emphasis on things and this forgetfulness of men; the ether trembles with the clamor for manhood. The fields, white to harvest, are awaiting the laborers who, building on the discoveries and inventions of things in the past, will so mold the human clay of the present that the future may boast a society of men and women possessing the qualities of the Super Race.
What is a Super Race? Nothing more nor less than a race representing, in the aggregate, the qualities of the Super Man—the qualities which enable one possessing them to live what Herbert Spencer described so luminously as a “complete life,” namely,—
1. Physical normality.
2. Mental capacity.
3. Concentration.
4. Aggressiveness.
5. Sympathy.
6. Vision.
These characteristics of the Super Man express themselves in his activity: