SCIENTIFIC PHILANTHROPY. 527 



quires or expends on his own account and for the exercise of his own 

 personal functions he can not transmit again by generation to other 

 individuals. 



It is certainly not proper to push the preceding biological induc- 

 tions, the truth of which is only general, to extremes. Mr. Spencer 

 himself has not always kept the measure or avoided inexact intepreta- 

 tions of the laws in question. Practically, and in the actual condition 

 of affairs, the superior races and the individuals belonging to those 

 races, do not lose their generative power except when they give them- 

 selves up to what we might call intellectual debauchery. But sterility 

 rarely comes from this cause. Man can nearly always, even when he 

 abandons himself to mental labors, maintain a procreative power fully 

 equivalent to that of the woman with whom he is mated, and it is un- 

 reasonable to demand more of him. It is, then, the woman that must 

 be considered, looking at the question from this point. Mr. Spencer 

 remarks, in support of his thesis, that the women among the higher 

 classes, in whom mental labor is carried to excess, are relatively infer- 

 tile ; but there are also several elements to be distinguished here. The 

 women of Paris have, for instance, a weight of brain which, accord- 

 ing to the anthropologists, raises them but little above negresses : they 

 should, then, by the theory we are considering, be very fertile, like 

 the negresses ; but the contrary is the case. The real reason of this 

 is, that while the brain of a Parisian woman is definitively but little 

 overstocked with ideas, her whole body is still less developed than her 

 brain ; but it is not so with the strong-limbed negresses. Why has the 

 body of the Parisian woman been arrested in its development ? Do 

 not lay it to her intelligence, but to her want of intelligence, to cos- 

 tumes and fashion, to bad hygienic conditions, to parties, vigils, balls, 

 and theatres ; to the activity, at the same time feverish and frivolous, 

 of a wholly worldly life in an air more or less vitiated. In the same 

 way, if the daughters of aristocratic families are relatively infertile, 

 there is nothing to prove that their infertility arises from mental labor. 

 In short, whenever mental labor is really a cause of diminished fer- 

 tility, it is so by being excessive, and not by its Well-regulated exer- 

 cise. The same is the case with every excess of labor, even physical ; 

 the common workman or laborer may exhaust himself as much as the 

 thinker. Mr. Spencer has not sufficiently distinguished here between 

 the normal and the exaggerated exercise of the brain. A normal ex- 

 ercise, in which the functional expenditure is not above the nutrition 

 of the organs, but below it, does not appear to us to diminish fecun- 

 dity, or, at least, does not diminish it enough to trammel the develop- 

 ment of the species. In the normal individual, intellectual produc- 

 tivity and sexual productivity march in line ; they are, as it were, the 

 two poles at which the excess of nutrition is expended after a right 

 fashion ; but, in case one of the poles draws all to itself, it is evident 

 that the other pole will lose correspondingly. The almost exclusive 



