humanfaculty4 - page 222 of 305

Inquiries into Human Faculty

with a little power and intelligence, he ought, I submit, to awake to a

fuller knowledge of his relatively great position, and begin to assume a

deliberate part in furthering the great work of evolution. He may infer the

course it is bound to pursue, from his observation of that which it has

already followed, and he might devote his modicum of power,

intelligence, and kindly feeling to render its future progress less slow and

painful. Man has already furthered evolution very considerably, half

unconsciously, and for his own personal advantages, but he has not yet

risen to the conviction that it is his religious duty to do so deliberately and

systematically.

The fact of an individual being naturally gifted with high qualities,

may be due either to his being an exceptionally good specimen of a poor

race, or an average specimen of a high one. The difference of origin

would betray itself in his descendants; they would revert towards the

typical centre of their race, deteriorating in the first case but not in the

second. The two cases, though theoretically distinct, are confused in

reality, owing to the frequency with which exceptional personal qualities

connote the departure of the entire nature of the individual from his

ancestral type, and the formation of a new strain having its own typical

centre. It is hardly necessary to add that it is in this indirect way that

natural selection improves a race. The two events of selection and

difference of race ought, however, to be carefully distinguished in broad

practical considerations, while the frequency of their concurrence is borne

in mind and allowed for.

So long as the race remains radically the same, the stringent selection

of the best specimens to rear and breed from, can never lead to any

permanent result. The attempt to raise the standard of such a race is like

the labour of Sisyphus in rolling his stone uphill; let the effort be relaxed

for a moment, and the stone will roll back. Whenever a new typical

centre appears, it is as though there was a facet upon the lower surface of

the stone, on which it is capable of resting without rolling back. It affords

a temporary sticking-point in the forward progress of evolution.