Schopenhauer as Educator by Friedrich Nietzsche

It is sometimes harder to agree to a thing than to understand it; many will feel this when they consider the proposition -- "Mankind must toil unceasingly to bring forth individual great men: this and nothing else is its task. " One would like to apply to society and its ends a fact that holds universally in the animal and vegetable world; where progress depends only on the higher individual types, which are rarer, yet more persistent, complex and productive. But traditional notions of what the end of society is, absolutely bar the way. We can easily understand how in the natural world, where one species passes at some point into a higher one, the aim of their evolution cannot be held to lie in the high level attained by the mass, or in the latest types developed; -- but rather in what seem accidental beings produced here and there by favourable circumstances.

It should be just as easy to understand that it is the duty of mankind to provide the circumstances favourable to the birth of the new redeemer, simply because men can have a consciousness of their object. But there is always something to prevent them. They find their ultimate aim in the happiness of all, or the greatest number, or in the expansion of a great commonwealth.