mong others,
George Eliot tried very desperately to marry him. But after he had made
it plain, over a long series of years, that he was prepared to resist
marriage to the full extent of his military and naval power, the girls
dropped off one by one, and so his last decades were full of peace and
he got a great deal of very important work done.

21. The Effect on the Race

It is, of course, not well for the world that the highest sort of men
are thus selected out, as the biologists say, and that their superiority
dies with them, whereas the ignoble tricks and sentimentalities of
lesser men are infinitely propagated. Despite a popular delusion that
the sons of great men are always dolts, the fact is that intellectual
superiority is inheritable, quite as easily as bodily strength; and that
fact has been established beyond cavil by the laborious inquiries of
Galton, Pearson and the other anthropometricians of the English school.
If such men as Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Nietzsche
had married and begotten sons, those sons, it is probable, would have
contributed as much to philosophy as the sons and grandsons of Veit Bach
contributed to music, or those of Erasmus Darwin to biology, or those of
Henry Adams to politics, or those of Hamilcar Barcato the art of war.
I have said that Herbert Spencer's escape from marriage facilitated his
life-work, and so served the immediate good of English philosophy, but
in the long run it will work a detriment, for he left no sons to carry
on his labours, and the remaining Englishmen of his time were unable
to supply the lack. His celibacy, indeed, made English philosophy
co-extensive with his life; since his death the whole body of
metaphysical speculation produced in England has been of little more,
practical value to the world than a drove of bogs. In precisely the same
way the celibacy of Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche has reduced German
philosophy to feebleness.

Even setting aside this direct influence of heredity, there is the
equally potent influence of example and tuition. It is a gigantic
advantage to live on intimate terms with a first-rate, man, and have his
care. Hamilcar not only gave the Carthagenians a great general in his
actual son; he also gave them a great general in his son-in-law, trained
in his camp. But the tendency of the first-rate man to remain a bachelor
is very strong, and Sidney Lee once showed that, of all the great
writers of Englan