the serious consideration which they
deserve." I hope, then, that I may be acquitted of undue presumption in
opposing a view sanctioned by the author of the _Origin of Species_, but
already stoutly questioned and firmly rejected by such followers of his
as Weismann, Wallace, Poulton, Ray Lankester, and others, to say nothing
of its practical rejection by so great an authority on heredity as
Francis Galton.

The sociological importance of the subject has already been insisted on
in emphatic terms by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and this importance may be
even greater than he imagined.

Civilization largely sets aside the harsh but ultimately salutary action
of the great law of Natural Selection without providing an efficient
substitute for preventing degeneracy. The substitute on which moralists
and legislators rely--if they think on the matter at all--is the
cumulative inheritance of the beneficial effects of education, training,
habits, institutions, and so forth--the inheritance, in short, of
acquired characters, or of the effects of use and disuse. If this
substitute is but a broken reed, then the deeper thinkers who gradually
teach the teachers of the people, and ultimately even influence the
legislators and moralists, must found their systems of morality and
their criticisms of social and political laws and institutions and
customs and ideas on the basis of the Darwinian law rather than on that
of Lamarck.

Looking forward to the hope that the human race may become consciously
and increasingly master of itself and of its destiny, and recognizing
the Darwinian principle of the selection of the fittest as the _only_
means of preventing the moral and physical degeneracy which, like an
internal dry rot, has hitherto been the besetting danger of all
civilizations, I desire that the thinkers who mould the opinions of
mankind shall not be led astray from the true path of enduring progress
and happiness by reliance on fallacious beliefs which will not bear
examination. Such, at least, is the feeling or motive which has prompted
me to devote much time and thought to a difficult but important inquiry
in a debatable region of inference and conjecture, where (I am afraid)
evidence on either side can never be absolutely conclusive, and where,
especially, the absolute demonstration of a universal negative cannot
reasonably be expected.

CONTENTS.

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