356 Postscript 



"sympathy," of "parental and filial affection," of "social 

 affection," of the "instinct of self-sacrifice" and so on, in the 

 lower animals so as to have a starting point for these attri- 

 butes as they occur in civilized man. It was not at all his 

 purpose to show, as the German perversion of the struggle- 

 and-survival hypothesis holds, that the evolution of man 

 has consisted largely in a farther differentiation and intensi- 

 fication of the dominantly brute attributes, with an infusion 

 as a kind of by-product from the struggle for existence, of 

 certain "humanistic sentimentalities," which in reality are 

 signs of weakness and must be suppressed.* 



And this perversion by German science and philosophy of 

 Darwin's teaching is rooted very deep in German culture and 

 character. The straightforward, common-sense descriptions 

 and inductions of the practical-minded, country-dwelling, 

 country-loving, unacademic English naturalist were alto- 

 gether too simple and unsophisticated to satisfy a Kultur 

 permeated through and through with the "highly strained 

 idealism" of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. The 

 two worst errors committed by Darwin were his over-em- 

 phasis on the natural selection hypothesis, and his pro- 

 pounding of the gemmule-pangenesis hypothesis ; and it is 

 highly characteristic that it was in just these two "strained" 

 speculations that German biology and practical philosophy 

 should have taken up Darwinism the most ardently and over- 

 worked it the most absurdly and disastrously. 



My examination of the germplasm-determinant theory of 

 Weismann in Part I of this book has revealed something of 

 the scope and nature which the gemmule fallacy was destined 

 to assume when it fell subject to German speculation. The 

 more subtle and far-reaching and humanly practical conse- 

 quences of the adoption and elaboration of the struggle-and- 



9 



The effort which Dr. George Nasmyth has made in his book Social 

 Progress and the Darwinian Theory to set right Darwin's position in 

 this matter, ought to bear fruit after a while. 



