SCIENTIFIC PHILANTHROPY. 523 



tiinents, labor, the first and essential instruments of labor, to raise 

 what is down, to bring up to the common light what is in darkness, 

 to restore to life and health what on account of want was threatened 

 with sickness or death, is to do real reparative justice, and at the same 

 time to re-establish some equality among men in the great competition 

 of life ; it is by this very fact to suppress factitious inequalities in order 

 to give free play to natural superiorities, in essence beneficent and no 

 longer malign. It is, we see, the theory of natural selection itself 

 coming to the support of the philanthropic sentiments against which 

 it had furnished objections. 



May not this preservation of the weak, which the partisans of 

 Darwin condemn, while it may sometimes become dangerous to tbe 

 physical health of the race, also save from death useful or even su- 

 perior minds who, without the cares given by tbe family or the aid 

 rendered by strangers, might not have been able to live and develop 

 themselves ? Do we have to lament that a Pascal and a Spinoza were 

 rescued from the death with which their feeble constitutions threat- 

 ened them from their youth ? How many poor children have there 

 been who, by means of the aid tbey have received, have afterward 

 become great men of science or great artists ! Here, then, is a second 

 advantage of philanthropy. After correcting injurious inequalities, 

 it favors useful superiorities. Furthermore, the preservation of organ- 

 isms which want would otherwise have destroyed, induces, by virtue 

 of the competition of life, an increasing elevation of intelligence which 

 becomes continually more necessary : all those who can not count on 

 the vigor of their limbs are obliged in the struggle for existence to 

 appeal to their mental faculties. Other men have had to employ con- 

 siderable intelligence to save them from death, and they are them- 

 selves obliged to employ it in their turn to preserve themselves, to 

 support themselves, to secure for themselves a place in the light of the 

 sun. Hence arises a progressive elevation of the intellectual level in 

 the whole mass of the nation. This movement is, in many points, 

 nothing but that of civilization itself, to which philanthropy is cor- 

 relative. 



We meet here a new objection : it is represented that talent, and 

 still more genius, are advantages of individuals which are paid for 

 at the expense of the race. We hear it repeated, with Plato, that a 

 soul which is mistress of itself will knock in vain at the doors of 

 poetry ; with Aristotle, that there is no great genius without a mixture 

 of folly ; and with Seneca, that nothing great or superior to what is 

 vulgar can be manifested without some trouble of mind ; more than 

 this, the objectors would extend to the race of the great man the 

 trouble and the morbid germ which, working itself out in some form 

 or another, will make the children pay dearly for the fame of their fa- 

 thers. " Every man of genius or talent," says M. Renan, " is a capital 

 accumulated from several generations." " This capital, accumulated 



