INTRODUCTION 



should submerge himself in the advancement of the 

 race, was really storing up a passion of fear, of 

 hatred, and of envy. It is true that evolution fostered 

 humanitarianism and the alleviation of physical ills 

 on the utilitarian ground of efficiency and of protec- 

 tion of society, but science also showed the possibili- 

 ties and the domination of power; the superman be- 

 came the ideal and all who failed to measure up to 

 the standard to be established as proper for progen- 

 itors of the new race must be obliterated, or at least 

 thrust into an asylum. Industrialism led to class op- 

 position, and medicine, with its insistence on the 

 omnipresent deadly germ, promoted the abandon- 

 ment of a fearless outlook on life and death. 



The awakening was the world war, a havoc of 

 mechanistic materialism and the subordination of the 

 individual. And this awakening is today accompanied 

 by signs of revolt from the outside against the domi- 

 nation of science and particularly of mechanistic evo- 

 lution. Omitting other clear indications of this revolt, 

 it is sufficient to point out that Bernard Shaw, with 

 his unerring instinct for sensational popularity, has 

 bitterly attacked Darwin in Back to Methuselah. 

 And Shaw knows his subject. In the preface to this 

 weird play, he has, in a masterly survey, shown why 

 evolution has dominated thought and why it has not 

 accomplished socially and ethically what it promised. 

 Although he ridicules the neo-Darwinians and touches 



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