BEYOND MAN It seems to me a lecturer's duty to speak to you about any remarkable thought at this moment engaging the attention of Western philosophers and men of science,--partly because any such new ideas are certain, sooner or later, to be reflected in literature, and partly because without a knowledge of them you might form incorrect ideas in relation to utterances of any important philosophic character.

I am not going to discourse about Nietzsche, though the title of this lecture is taken from one of his books; the ideas about which I am going to tell you, you will not find in his books.

It is most extraordinary, to my thinking, that these ideas never occurred to him, for he was an eminent man of science before writing his probably insane books.

I have not the slightest sympathy with most of his ideas; they seem to me misinterpretations of evolutional teachings; and if not misinterpretations, they are simply undeveloped and ill-balanced thinking.

But the title of one of his books, and the idea which he tries always unsuccessfully to explain,--that of a state above mankind, a moral condition "beyond man," as he calls it,--that is worth talking about.