EVOLUTION THEORIES 215 



strict inheritance, with the thought of con- 

 temporary Germany; with the victories and 

 hegemony of Prussia, the renewed claims of 

 its aristocracy also; and, above all, with its 

 doctrine of race, political and anthropolo- 

 gical combined. The intermediate step be- 

 tween this ruling Prussian world of action 

 and Weismann's ascendancy in speculative 

 biology is indicated by the widely diffused 

 doctrine of Count Gobineau, consciously and 

 avowedly bio-social as this has been. All 

 these movements alike have now found 

 eloquent, though hardly scientific, expres- 

 sion in Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose 

 contemporary vogue in Germany is thus 

 earned and explained. 



LIMITATIONS YET ADVANTAGES OF SOCIAL 

 OUTLOOK. But the reader may ere now be 

 saying: If this be true, if biological doctrines 

 be even half as much projections of their 

 social age as is here suggested, what becomes 

 of the independent scientific value they have 

 claimed, and which we are asked to grant? 

 Is your science merely a new anthropomor- 

 phism? and if so how does it differ from the 

 mythological accounts of Nature it claims 

 to displace? 



The answer is not so difficult as it seems, 

 the result not so unsatisfactory after all. 

 The independence of the doctrines of any 



