 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
344
Hereditary Genius
I have been speaking; thus the men that now rank under class G
would be increased seventeenfold, by raising the average ability of
the whole nation a single grade. We see by the table that all England
contains (on the average, of course, of several years) only six men
between the ages of thirty and eighty, whose natural gifts exceed
class G; but in a country of the same population as ours, whose
average was one grade higher, there would be eighty-two of such
men; and in another whose average was two grades higher (such as I
believe the Athenian to have been, in the interval 530—430 B.C.) no
less than 1, 355 of them would be found. There is no improbability in
so gifted a breed being able to maintain itself, as Athenian
experience, rightly understood, has sufficiently proved; and as has
also been proved by what I have written about the Judges, whose
fertility is undoubted, although their average natural ability is F, or 5.5
degrees above the average of our own, and 3.5 above that of the
average Athenians.
It seems to me most essential to the well-being of future
generations, that the average standard of ability of the present time
should be raised. Civilization is a new condition imposed upon man by
the course of events, just as in the history of geological changes new
conditions have continually been imposed on different races of
animals. They have had the effect either of modifying the nature of
the races through the process of natural selection, whenever the
changes were sufficiently slow and the race sufficiently pliant, or of
destroying them altogether, when the changes were too abrupt or the
race unyielding. The number of the races of mankind that have been
entirely destroyed under the pressure of the requirements of an
incoming civilization, reads us a terrible lesson. Probably in no former
period of the world has the destruction of the races of any animal
whatever, been effected over such wide areas and with such startling
rapidity as in the
 |
|
 |
|