About this piece: the short version of the project’s comparative monograph, Superhumanisms: Stapledon among the Supermen — the full study runs to some 18,000 words, carries 373 verified citations that expand to their passages in context, and states an explicit evidence tier for every claim about who read whom. Every quotation below is reused from that study’s verified set — re-checked against the held sources and the consensus transcription for this page — and the compression, with any distortions it risks, is the editors’ own.
In September 1887 a young American named Stanton Coit preached the discourses that won him the ministry of South Place — the freethinking chapel that would shortly rename itself, at his insistence, an Ethical Society. His sermon told the congregation what their God had always been: “the perfect human character projected outward... a vision which the human soul throws out from its own depths.” And it named the doctrine the new religion existed to bury:
“The doctrine that our Moral impulses... are injected upon supplication to a superhuman being for help, is so palpably false and degrading that it should be silenced.”
Follow that word through the movement’s own paper trail and the sentence holds for half a century. In Gustav Spiller’s The Ethical Movement in Great Britain — the organized movement’s history of itself, compiled from its own minute-books and printed, as it happens, in 1934 — the exact token “superhuman” occurs in two passages, and both times it is the enemy: Coit’s re-founding sermon, and a petition against school religion that makes “appeal to supernatural or superhuman motives.” Coit’s own major book, in 1907, uses it the same way: the coming religion “wholly discards trust in superhuman agencies as the source of moral inspiration”; “If prayer be but a petition to superhuman agencies, we have had enough of it.” Meanwhile “humanism” was becoming the movement’s proud self-name. From 1887 to 1934 the arithmetic of devotion was settled on that platform: the superhuman was what you outgrew; the human was what you worshipped.
The word comes back
On Sunday, 30 December 1934, Olaf Stapledon stood on the same platform — South Place, by then housed in Conway Hall — with thirty-four sheets of pencilled notes titled “Humanism and Superhumanism,” and the enemy word walked back in as a creed. Not the adjective of what must be silenced, but an -ism, defined on his second and third sheets: humanism stated at its strongest — all service and worship due to “the awakening spirit of man” — and, against it, the position that humanism is not enough, whose starting point is “some positive experience of worship of a nonhuman Other,” an Other that “may be conceived as gods, Fate, God, Nature, a Principle of Order, the Whole etc.” Notice what the word is built like: “superhumanism” has the same grammar as “humanism.” It names no superman. It names a posture toward what is more than man.
And notice what it deletes. Coit’s sentence had damned the superhuman as something you supplicate — a helper, a wish-granter, a source of moral pocket-money. The 1934 sheets forbid petition as firmly as the sermon did — “we must outgrow the craving for security,” nothing asked, nothing promised — so the word returns purged of exactly the feature the movement had convicted it for. Read with both texts on one desk, the lecture and the founding sermon answer each other point for point.
Here the record demands a hard stop, and the full study spends a chapter honouring it. The reversal is a documented fact: the word’s career on that platform sits in the movement’s own books, and the lecture reversed it. Whether Stapledon knew that history — whether raising the enemy’s word was aimed or unwitting — is a question the held record cannot answer: he appears nowhere in Spiller’s history or Coit’s book, and nothing in his held letters, prose or sheets names either man. It is a decidable question — his pocket diaries carry reading lists, the Society’s Monthly Record reported the evening, and both are on the project’s outreach ledger — but until one of them speaks, the fact is the reversal, and the “capture” is our reading, not his documented act. What nobody disputes is the acoustics: whatever the grammar said, the 1930s ear heard superman in that title. The crowd of supermen it summoned is the story.
The crowd of supermen
By 1934 the culture was full of higher men, and each came with a theology attached. The monograph reads five streams at full length, each from its own held texts, with the evidence tiered claim by claim. In miniature:
The breeders. Francis Galton had made producing “a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages” a moral duty by 1869 — and had ended his founding book, surprisingly, in an actual theology: “the constitution of the living Universe is a pure theism,” with men as cells contributing “to the manifestation of a far higher life than our own.” A higher life dimly seen, of which man is an organ — close enough to the later Stapledon to make the difference the whole point. Galton’s higher life is bred and joined; it is never faced. The documented contact here sits at exactly one end, and it is loud: Stapledon’s first published essay, at twenty-two, opens “COLUMBUS FOUND A NEW WORLD; but Francis Galton found a new humanity” and dreams that “in time there will arise a splendid race of men.” (No document shows him reading Galton ever again; the founding books are the monograph’s comparison texts, not his sources.)
The vitalists. Bernard Shaw fused Galton’s arithmetic with a metaphysic and called the result a faith: “the great central purpose of breeding the race, ay, breeding it to heights now deemed superhuman”; by 1921 he could announce that “Creative Evolution is already a religion, and is indeed now unmistakeably the religion of the twentieth century.” The record shows Stapledon engaging that doctrine for decades — from the war-years letters to the 1939 philosophy textbook that expounds the Life Force and prints its verdicts — though no document ties any particular Shaw or Bergson text to the 1934 evening. And the play knew something about its own religion that the comparison turns on: Shaw’s Devil warns, on his way out, “Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human.” Keep that sentence; the lecture will answer it.
The engineers. J. D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929) is transcendence as an engineering project: the post-organic body, merged minds, humanity “ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light” — no worship anywhere in it, and its author proud of the absence. Here the contact is documented at both ends, and dated. Seven weeks before the lecture, Bernal reviewed Stapledon’s Waking World in the Listener and panned its religion — the author demanding from science a mystical “beatific vision,” a faith so reduced hardly “worth preserving at all” — and Stapledon read it and bled: “I’m afraid Waking World has damned me in the eyes of the scientists... they’re so sure of themselves.” Seven weeks later he stood up at South Place and defended precisely the worship the review had ruled worthless. The sequel gives the whole relationship its formula: when Star Maker (1937) needed artificial planets, its preface thanked “Mr. J. D. Bernal’s fascinating little book” for them. Engineering admired; worship withheld.
The Superman himself. Nietzsche’s documented contact with Stapledon is one letter, written from an ambulance-unit billet in January 1918, and it deserves quoting at its exact strength, which is this: “I have been reading Nietzsche’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra,’ but in translation. It is annoyingly pompous, and its ideal is ludicrously egotistical; but it has brilliant truths in it here and there... It is a book to make one think, even if the thinking is often hostile to the author’s idea.” A sifting verdict, not a scoffer’s — and very nearly the whole record; after 1918 the name almost vanishes from his held prose. Commentators have assumed Nietzsche presided over Stapledon’s superman fiction; the one document we hold is the counter-evidence, at that strength and no more. The deeper relation is a perfect chiasmus: Zarathustra keeps the adoring energy and re-aims it at man’s future, while forbidding worship as a relapse into madness; Stapledon keeps the worship and re-aims it away from man and everything man will ever become — while forbidding the contempt. Each occupies exactly the position the other forbids.
And the control experiment. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin built the other cosmic-evolutionary religion of the same decade: The Phenomenon of Man, drafted — its own dateline — in Peking, June 1938 to June 1940, circulated in mimeograph, and published only in 1955, five years after Stapledon’s death. No contact is documented in either direction: the held Teilhard never mentions Stapledon, and “Teilhard,” “Chardin,” “noosphere” and any Teilhardian “Omega” score zero across the held Stapledon, his reading lists and his biography. That verified mutual silence, with the chronology, makes independence much the most economical conclusion — documented silence, note, not a proof of impossibility — while third parties braid the two men into one period fabric: Teilhard quotes with delight “some masterly lines recently written by J. B. S. Haldane,” the same Haldane whose 1927 Possible Worlds is the documented seed of Last and First Men’s expansion. So the fork between them is the period’s cleanest controlled experiment: same evolutionary cosmos, same communal summit, worship at the centre of both. Teilhard’s summit must be “loving and lovable” — his system, by its own logic, cannot survive total death. The Star Maker “neither loved nor had need of love,” and Stapledon’s discipline is built on accepting precisely the wall Teilhard’s forbids. One made the summit a lover to be met; the other forbade himself the meeting.
The inversion
Line the maker streams up and they conjugate one verb: improve. Breed the stock, will the next man, engineer the body, join the organism. The 1934 lecture conjugates a different verb at a different object, and its scandal is the insistence that the two are not rivals: you upgrade the human; you worship the nonhuman; and neither verb can do the other’s work.
The sheets run the improver’s question with complete seriousness — four hypothetical worlds, among them “a brotherhood of equal supermen,” dismissed as impossible “∵ capacities vary in rank” (rank was never the quarrel; Zarathustra would have signed that line). Then they step past the whole exercise. The margin of sheet 27 fixes man’s place in one clause — “man is transitional & scarcely a beginning” — and beside it, double-underlined, stands the clause every maker of supermen would have to deny: “the great Other includes Man.” We are not upstream of the divine; we are a local event inside it. Sheet 28 gives the creed its sentence — the words “and Majesty” are a diagonal insertion, dread’s element slotted in beside beauty’s:
I am aware of an unspeakable Beauty and Majesty, which I salute though it destroy me. I can say no more about it, but only about its effects on me.
And sheet 30 answers the question the whole evening has circled — what is man for? — in the manuscript’s most eloquent square inch: “To worship,” struck out; then, double-underlined, “To worship” restored. Against Shaw’s Devil, the position is fenced on the human side too: worship of the more-than-human bound to unswerving service of the human — a superhumanism that forbids the contempt. Against Coit, the same year’s Waking World closes the projection question from the other side: “even to worship a loving God is really to worship our own nature made perfect... That is just where the trouble lies” — one clause that disposes, impartially, of the ethical church’s deified Spirit of Man, Shaw’s coming Superman, and (by exact, unknowing anticipation) Teilhard’s loving Omega. And when Stapledon’s own fiction bred its superman — Odd John, 1935 — the colony of supernormals chose destruction over war so as to finish its “accepted spiritual task of worship,” to “salute That in the universe which was of supreme excellence.” In the whole superman literature that is the one faculty the genre had never issued its heroes. His supermen worship; they do not expect to be worshipped.
One paragraph now that the record insists on, because a tale of Stapledon-against-the-breeders would curdle into hagiography. He kept both commitments. The man who inverted the superman tradition’s religion never renounced its technique: the 1908 essay wanted tainted marriages “prevented by public opinion, which should be aided by legislation” — a statutory clause that went beyond Galton’s own persuasion-only programme; the 1931 broadcast still hoped “that the creation of such a race will become in time the constant policy of all mankind”; and in 1948, two years before his death, he was contemplating “eugenical technique” to “breed new human types of men to people the planets.” The 1934 position disavows the worship of supermen — the bred god, the Race deity — not the ambition to remake human stock, and the two ran side by side to the end. He is not the anti-Galton. He is a Galton-formed progressive who relocated the divine — which is exactly what makes the relocation legible as a choice rather than a temperament.
The half-memory
The word’s career had two more stations and a prologue. In 1957 Julian Huxley — the arch evolutionary humanist — needed “a name for this new belief” and coined the one the next century would use: “Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” His essay names Stapledon nowhere and claims nothing about him — the junction is lexical, not a reception — but mark the phrase: man remaining man is precisely the clause the 1934 lecture had spent an evening judging not enough.
In 1972 the reception arrives, crown and sneer in the same three pages. Robert Ettinger, the founder of cryonics, opens Man into Superman in the first person of the new faith — “By working hard and saving my money, I intend to become an immortal superman” — and titles his survey of the literature “From Gilgamesh to Olaf Stapledon”: the entire prehistory of the superman, running from the oldest epic to Stapledon as its terminus. The crown: “he may have contributed more than any other single writer to concepts of superman.” The sneer, in the same breath: “In short, he is little more than an amateur philosopher.” And the tell: in the whole book, Stapledon’s own word for his own position — “superhumanism” — occurs not once; and when a fellow immortalist talks of becoming “gods,” Ettinger objects that the phrasing “brings unpleasant and inaccurate connotations, such as a desire for worshippers.” Read that twice. To the upgrade tradition, worship is not even a temptation — it is a public-relations liability, something a superman might embarrassingly want from others. That a superman might give worship — the entire content of Odd John’s ending — is not rejected. It is never conceived.
By 2005 the movement had written its own genealogy — Nick Bostrom’s “A History of Transhumanist Thought” — and Stapledon is in it, twice in one paragraph: “the works of Olaf Stapledon, a philosopher and science fiction author,” who with Wells “got many people thinking about the future evolution of the human race.” A tree rooted, by its own account, in the very humanism the 1934 lecture answered. And around the naming, verified zeros: no “superhumanism,” no Last and First Men, no Star Maker, no Odd John, no 1934; across the movement’s two founding documents, “worship” zero, “reverence” zero; the corpus’s one “awe” is aimed at civilization itself, “humanity’s most glorious achievement.” The genealogy claims the futurist; its ontology has no slot for the worshipper.
What the forgetting loses
Say it first with the record’s own restraint: nothing here documents a rejection. Bostrom read no lecture manuscript — nobody could; it sat uncatalogued in a Liverpool archive. Ettinger read the epics the way an engineer reads them. Huxley named his own position, not Stapledon’s. The forgetting is an omission with structural causes, not a motive. But the omission has a content, and because the monograph measured the streams one by one, the content can be stated exactly.
What the upgrade tradition lost with the worshipper is not piety — it never wanted piety — but three working parts of a complete position. An object that survives defeat: every good in the modern founding documents is immanent to human, sentient or posthuman flourishing, so at the point of final defeat the position has nothing left to do — where the Last Men, out of time and out of options, end in praise: “Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them... But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment.” A discipline against self-congratulation: the lecture’s charge that even the best humanism becomes a “mutual improvement and admiration society” lands harder on a movement whose one recorded awe is for its own species’ achievement. And an honest place for the dread: the moderns kept the dread — it reappears in their existential-risk literature, catastrophe standing where the tremendum stood — but stripped of any posture toward it except prevention. Stapledon held that some of what confronts us is not a problem to be solved but a majesty to be faced. Whether he was right, no method of this project can decide. What the shelf shows is narrower and firmer: one thinker stood inside the superman tradition — formed by Galton’s heirs, seeded by Haldane, corresponding with Wells, crowned afterwards by the tradition’s own chroniclers — and re-aimed its whole devotional energy at something no programme could ever produce. The word he raised for that position, on the one platform in England whose own records had used it only for the enemy, is now nobody’s word at all. Which may be the cleanest measure of how alone the position was — and remains.