486 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



In him the native harshness of the race is disguised. Alfred Russel 

 Wallace, because of the clarity of his reasoning, betrays the precise 

 manner in which one falls into the mistake of supposing great men to 

 be a racial barometer. He declares : 14 



Tolstoy can hardly be ranked as higher than Buddha, or Ruskin than Con- 

 fucius, and as we can not suppose the amount of variation of human faculty 

 about a mean to be very different now from what it was in that remote era, we 

 must conclude that equality in the highest implies equality in the mean, and that 

 human nature on the whole has not advanced during the last three thousand 

 years. 



Wallace did not realize that in some particulars the highest may 

 seemingly, at the distance of thirty centuries, belie the mean. 



Selection has had an almost infinite variety of human material to 

 work on — all sorts of combinations between intellectual powers and 

 moral excellencies. What selection has apparently done, through those 

 agencies we have denominated the elimination of the anti-social, is to 

 knock apart the two sets of endowments, and to recombine them in ways 

 which give us, speaking broadly, a general average of greater moral 

 stability linked with lesser innate talent. Civilization, in bending 

 human nature to its wheel, has softened it and at the same time 

 crushed out some of its virgin vigor. 



14 Essay on ' ' Evolution and Character. ' ' 



