CIVILIZATION AS A SELECTIVE AGENCY 485 



To get altruism we have sacrificed the higher, intenser type of 

 energy; and the cowboy, the soldier and the haughty aristocrat typify 

 the passing virtues of the race. There is a great deal of pregnant 

 meaning in the assertion of William James that the world is evolving 

 into a middle-class paradise. 10 



An irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and medi- 

 ocrity, church socials and teachers ' conventions, are taking the place of the old 

 heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. . . . The higher heroisms and 

 the rare old flavors are passing out of life. 



Along with this probable decline in energy and intensity, it must be 

 remembered that the elimination of the anti-social has never conferred 

 survival value on originality, on intellectual independence, on path- 

 breaking initiative, or on genius. In fact the very agencies which con- 

 served sociability were the ones which cut down inventive capacity. No 

 force has been at work to increase the racial store of eloquence, poetic 

 imagination, of musical and mathematical ability; so that, while there 

 has been a progressive selection of the fundamental moral qualities, 

 there has perhaps at the same time been a deterioration in the esthetic 

 endowment. 



It is plain, then, why individuals of the noblest intellectual and 

 moral qualities appeared as often in early civilizations as among the 

 millions we spawn to-day — why, as James Bryce phrases it, 11 those 

 rare combinations of gifts which produce poetry and philosophy of the 

 first order " are revealed no more frequently in a great European nation 

 now than they were in a Semitic tribe or a tiny Greek city twenty-five 

 or thirty centuries ago." Nothing which the human mind exhibits at 

 present has been added by nature since the dawn of history. The 

 esthetic and intellectual powers were then in as full, if not fuller, bloom, 

 as now, being, as Weismann points out, by-products of the human mind, 

 which had been " so highly developed in all directions." 12 The average 

 man in those times was, we may safely assume, more brutal and flightier 

 than the average man of to-day, but he probably possessed a larger store 

 of native ability, more of sheer mental energy. 13 Selection, through the 

 elimination of the anti-social, has whittled us down, so to speak, to fit 

 our civil environment, cutting away our intellectual strength and our 

 moral weakness with the same strokes. 



This is the reason that it is unsafe to argue from the exceptional 

 man to the average man. The exceptional man, in the nature of the 

 case, exhibits a combination of the higher ethical and intellectual traits. 



10" Talks to Students on Some of Life's Ideals." 



11 "American Commonwealth," Vol. 11, p. 768. 



12 Lecture on ' ' Heredity. ' ' 



is This is quite in accord with Galton's calculation that the average ability 

 of the Athenian race was nearly two of the mental grades higher than that of 

 present-day Englishmen. "Hereditary Genius," p. 330. 



