524 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and personified in a man," says M. Jacoby, " does not return again to 

 the commonwealth, but is lost from it, at least in a physical point of 

 view ; it is withdrawn from circulation, and the only trace it leaves is 

 folly, wretchedness, and degeneracy in posterity." Nothing is made 

 out of nothing, and all production supposes some consumption. Sci- 

 ence, art, and ideas, to be born and develop themselves, consume 

 generations and peoples. Individuals and nations exhaust themselves 

 by production, like lands not manured, because the products are not 

 returned to the common ground, and are materially lost to it. M. de 

 Candolle also shows that civilized man, by the very fact of his mental 

 superiority, is generally inferior to the savage in physical force and 

 health. With the savage, in fact, the chief conditions of selection 

 are a piercing sight, a fine hearing, muscular strength, and the faculty 

 of resisting cold, heat, moisture, and hunger. The civilized man has 

 not these qualities in the same degree ; what he gains on one side he 

 loses on the other, and the law of equivalence of forces is verified here 

 as elsewhere. The brain grows only at the expense of the muscles ; 

 the man who thinks is in a sense a depraved animal. Such are the 

 inconveniences of the intellectual development which modern philan- 

 thropy tends to favor at the expense of physical force. We are far 

 from desiring to deny these inconveniences, but conclusions which go 

 further than the premises need not be drawn from them. Social sci- 

 ence is doubtless right in saying it is dangei-ous for individuals and 

 peoples to break entirely the natural equilibrium of physical and men- 

 tal functions : mens sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound 

 body) ; if a nation becomes physically enfeebled too rapidly, it will 

 have neither time nor means to fortify itself mentally, for intelligence 

 can not make real progress in decaying organisms ; all will end in a 

 simultaneous dwindling of mind and body. But it is necessary, on 

 the other side, to look out that the natural movement of civilization 

 be not trammeled. Now, this movement is characterized by the in- 

 creasing predominance of thought and feeling among modern nations. 

 This predominance favors the development of philanthropy, and is in its 

 turn favored by that through an inevitable reaction. The question of 

 philanthropy, then, when generalized, ultimately becomes confounded 

 with that of civilization itself. Now, it would not do to repeat to-day 

 Rousseau's dissertation against inequality and the arts ; we could not 

 take man back to the savage state under the pretext that civilization 

 exhausts his physical forces and the best of his vigor in the intellectual 

 blossoming. The whole of society, in profiting by the discoveries of 

 science or art, profits by the sacrifice of individuals or of their imme- 

 diate posterity, if there is a sacrifice, and the profit exceeds the loss. 



This loss even might be avoided by a better understanding of 

 hygiene and a better system of education ; and precisely these ought 

 to be the principal aims of philanthropy. Hitherto the economy of 

 nature, in order to repair the loss incurred by intellectual culture, has 



