262 Nietzsche
makes the ape an early relative of man, which led Nietzsche to have his
Zarathustra explain: "Once you were apes, and even now man is more
ape than any ape" (4,14; Ζ First Part, Prologue § 3). The definition of
man as a product of biological development implied that even the so-
called mind was regarded as a bodily function of the head, spinal cord,
nerves, and so forth.
It is in this sense that Nietzsche also turned his attention to the physi-
ological side of mental faculties and in Zarathustra wrote about the "great
rationality of the body: the creative body created the mind for itself as a
hand of its will" (4,40; ZFirst Part, "On the Despisers of the Body"). But
this naturalization of the mind and the consequent relativization of the
special status of man, which was in effect a disparagement of man, is only
one of the two major aspects of the effects of Darwinism.
The other aspect, in stark contrast to the first, is marked by positively
euphoric visions of human evolution, because it was now possible to
extend the idea of progress to biological development. If evolution has
led to man, why should it stop with man? Why might there not be an
even higher form of life, an Übermensch as a higher biological type?
Darwin did not use the term Übermensch, but the application of biologi-
cal futurism to man was not unfamiliar to him. The logic of the idea of
development was bound to lead to fantasies of this sort. Darwin wrote:
"Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not
of his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the
fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed
there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future"
(Darwin, Descent 644).
Darwin maintained a certain degree of skepticism. He was well aware
that this envisioned future was a product of the human mind, which was
subject to wishful thinking and inflated self-assessment. "Can the mind
of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low
as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such
grand conclusions?" (Darwin, Autobiography 93).
Many Darwinians were less hesitant. David Friedrich Strauss, for