So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, “the purer man,” or “the happier man,” or “the sadder man,” for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming.  He says “the upper man,” or “over man,” a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.  Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker.  He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce.  And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being “higher,” do not know either.

Then again, some people fall back on sheer submission and sitting still.  Nature is going to do something some day; nobody knows what, and nobody knows when.  We have no reason for acting, and no reason for not acting.  If anything happens it is right:  if anything is prevented it was wrong.  Again, some people try to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything.  Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs.  Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know.

Lastly, there is a fourth class of people who take whatever it is that they happen to want, and say that that is the ultimate aim of evolution.  And these are the only sensible people.  This is the only really healthy way with the word evolution, to work for what you want, and to call that evolution.  The only intelligible sense that progress or advance can have among men, is that we have a definite vision, and that we wish to make the whole world like that vision.  If you like to put it so, the essence of the doctrine is that what we have around us is the mere method and preparation for something that we have to create.  This is not a world, but rather the materials for a world.  God has given us not so much the colours of a picture as the colours of a palette.  But He has also given us a subject, a model, a fixed vision.  We must be clear about what we want to paint.  This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles.  We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it.  We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary) in order to have something to change it to.

We need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress:  personally I prefer to call it reform.  For reform implies form.  It implies that we are trying to shape the world in a particular image; to make it something that we see already in our minds.  Evolution is a metaphor from mere automatic unrolling.  Progress is a metaphor from merely walking along a road—­very likely the wrong road.  But reform is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men:  it means that we see a certain thing out of shape and we mean to put it into shape.  And we know what shape.