In him the native harshness of the race is disguised. Alfred Russel Wallace, because of the clarity of his reasoning, betrays the precise manner in which one falls into the mistake of supposing great men to be a racial barometer. He declares:[1]
Tolstoy can hardly be ranked as higher than Buddha, or Ruskin than Confucius, and as we can not suppose the amount of variation of human faculty about a mean to be very different now from what it was in that remote era, we must conclude that equality in the highest implies equality in the mean, and that human nature on the whole has not advanced during the last three thousand years.
Wallace did not realize that in some particulars the highest may seemingly, at the distance of thirty centuries, belie the mean.
Selection has had an almost infinite variety of human material to work on—all sorts of combinations between intellectual powers and moral excellencies. What selection has apparently done, through those agencies we have denominated the elimination of the anti-social, is to knock apart the two sets of endowments, and to recombine them in ways which give us, speaking broadly, a general average of greater moral stability linked with lesser innate talent. Civilization, in bending human nature to its wheel, has softened it and at the same time crushed out some of its virgin vigor.
- ↑ Essay on "Evolution and Character."
