To get altruism we have sacrificed the higher, intenser type of energy; and the cowboy, the soldier and the haughty aristocrat typify the passing virtues of the race. There is a great deal of pregnant meaning in the assertion of William James that the world is evolving into a middle-class paradise.[1]
An irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church socials and teachers' conventions, are taking the place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. . . . The higher heroisms and the rare old flavors are passing out of life.
Along with this probable decline in energy and intensity, it must be remembered that the elimination of the anti-social has never conferred survival value on originality, on intellectual independence, on pathbreaking initiative, or on genius. In fact the very agencies which conserved sociability were the ones which cut down inventive capacity. No force has been at work to increase the racial store of eloquence, poetic imagination, of musical and mathematical ability; so that, while there has been a progressive selection of the fundamental moral qualities, there has perhaps at the same time been a deterioration in the esthetic endowment.
It is plain, then, why individuals of the noblest intellectual and moral qualities appeared as often in early civilizations as among the millions we spawn to-day—why, as James Bryce phrases it,[2] those rare combinations of gifts which produce poetry and philosophy of the first order "are revealed no more frequently in a great European nation now than they were in a Semitic tribe or a tiny Greek city twenty-five or thirty centuries ago." Nothing which the human mind exhibits at present has been added by nature since the dawn of history. The esthetic and intellectual powers were then in as full, if not fuller, bloom, as now, being, as Weismann points out, by-products of the human mind, which had been "so highly developed in all directions."[3] The average man in those times was, we may safely assume, more brutal and flightier than the average man of to-day, but he probably possessed a larger store of native ability, more of sheer mental energy.[4] Selection, through the elimination of the anti-social, has whittled us down, so to speak, to fit our civil environment, cutting away our intellectual strength and our moral weakness with the same strokes.
This is the reason that it is unsafe to argue from the exceptional man to the average man. The exceptional man, in the nature of the case, exhibits a combination of the higher ethical and intellectual traits.
- ↑ "Talks to Students on Some of Life's Ideals."
- ↑ "American Commonwealth," Vol. 11, p. 768.
- ↑ Lecture on "Heredity."
- ↑ This is This is quite in accord with Galton's calculation that the average ability of the Athenian race was nearly two of the mental grades higher than that of present-day Englishmen. "Hereditary Genius," p. 330.
