If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs." Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test.

We often hear it said, for instance, "What is right in one age is wrong in another." This is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times.

If women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner.

But you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong.

If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard?
Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them.