loo ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 



^^ Lectures, Second Series, p. 373. 



42 Ibid., p. 353. 



43 Guerard, op. cit., p. 33. 



44 Op. cit.. Chapter V, 'Race', p. 94. 



45 La Fontaine, pp. 7-8, our italics. This may have been in response to Sainte- 

 Beuve's criticism (cf. our Chapter IV, Note 39). 



46 Ibid., p. 8, Note. 



47 Ibid., p. 9. 



48 Theory of Literature, p. loi. 



49 An historical perspective is probably more just than a contemporary one 

 on these issues. It should be remembered that both the 'purity of kinds' and 

 their hierarchical order were essential parts of neo-classical critical theory 

 {ibid.. Chapter XVII, 'Literary Genres', especially pp. 239-240, 244). 



50 Lectures, Second Series, p. 177. 



51 Ibid., p. 188. Another reference to superiority of race occurs in Taine's 

 imaginary reconstruction of the early history of the Netherlands: 'Men of 

 another stamp would not have succeeded; the milieu was too unfavourable. 

 In analogous conditions the inferior races of Canada and Russian America 

 (Alaska, S. J. K.) have remained savage; other well-endowed races, the Celts 

 of Ireland and the Highland Scotch, attained only to a chivalric standard of 

 society and poetic legends. Here there had to be good, sound heads, a capacity 

 to subject sensation to thought, to patiently endure ennui and fatigue, to accept 

 privation and labour in view of a remote end, in short a Germanic race, mean- 

 ing by this men organized to cooperate together, to toil, to struggle, to begin 

 over and over again and ameliorate unceasingly . . .' {ibid., pp. 196-197). 

 Here race does not seem to be merely a biological factor but also to involve 

 qualities of character; and the implication is, not so much of all-around 

 superiority, as of superiority in particular directions which enabled a particular 

 group to master a particular environment. This is a typical expression of Social 

 Darwinism, which fell prey to an elementary fallacy common to most Darwinian 

 reasoning: the 'survival of the fittest' was taken to indicate a general 'fitness', 

 whereas all it really implies is 'fitness to survive'. The reasoning is circular. 



52 History of English Literature, I, 66. 



53 Lectures, Second Series, p. 169, our italics. 



54 History of English Literature, I, 143. 



55 Jsfouveaux Essais, pp. 172-183. 



56 French Civilization in the Nineteenth Century: A Historical Introduction, pp. 35-36. 



57 Dunn and Dobzhansky, op. cit., p. 95. 'Genes' and 'chromosomes' bring 

 us closer to the full complexity of the problems than does 'blood', but they do 

 not change the basic fact of biological groupings {ibid., pp. 111-112). Franz 

 Boas, an outstanding critic of 'racist' thinking, in his 'Introduction' to Ruth 

 Benedict's Patterns of Culture, referred to the 'dominant character' of a culture 

 in a phrase reminiscent of Taine; another recent example in the Taine tradition 

 is by Geoffrey Gorer, a British-born anthropologist: The American People: A 

 study in national character; similar examples could be multiplied. Abram Kardiner, 

 et al., suggest replacing both the 'race' and the 'culture' concepts by a tech- 

 nique of investigation focussed on the 'basic personality type' {The Psychological 

 Frontiers of Society, p. xv). These are all just as much abstractions as 'race' ever 

 was; what counts is, not the inevitable fact of abstraction in science, but the 



