11)08] on BloJogy and History. 51 



Unction between these two hinds of human ])rogress is as cardinal as it 

 is hitherto ignored. 



It was said just now that acquired characters are not transmissible 

 by heredity ; but man has learnt to circumvent the laws of heredity 

 by transmitting his spiritual acquirements through language and art. 

 Even before writing, there was tradition passed on from mouth to 

 mouth. As long as man was speechless he advanced, I believe, no faster 

 than other creatures —we know that he has an undistinguished past of 

 some hundreds of thousands of years : but with speech and writing 

 came the transmission of acquirements in this special sense. The 

 past education of a mother will not enlarge her baby's brain, but she 

 can teach her daughter what she has learnt, and so the child can, in a 

 sense, begin where the parent left off — in analogy with what Lamarck 

 wrongly imagined to be the case with the young giraffe, that was 

 supposed to profit by the stretching of the parental necks. It is 

 this transmission of spiritual acquirements — outside the germ-plasm, 

 and notwithstanding its laws — that explains the amazing acquired 

 progress of man in the last ten or twenty thousand years, as compared 

 with three or perhaps five hundred thousand before them. 



This kind of progress is peculiar to man ; it is the gift of intelli- 

 gence, and it may be called traditional or acquired jjroc/ress. It is an 

 utterly different thing from inherent or racial progress, an improve- 

 ment in the breed dependent upon the happy choice of parents. And 

 it is surely evident that acquired progress is compatible with inherent 

 decadence. To use Coleridge's image, a dwarf may see further than 

 a giant if he sits on the giant's shoulders ; yet he is a dwarf, and the 

 other a giant. Any schoolboy now knows more than Aristotle, and 

 that is true progress of one kind, but the schoolboy may well be a 

 dwarf compared with Aristotle, and may belong to a race degenerate 

 when compared with his : and that would be inherent or racial deca- 

 dence subsisting with acquired or traditioncd progress. 



Now whilst the accumulation of knowledge and art and inven- 

 tion from age to age is real progress, it evidently depends for its 

 security upon the quality of the race. If the race degenerates — 

 whether through a racial poison, alcohol or malaria, or through, say, 

 the selection of the worst for parentage — the time will come when its 

 heritage is too much for it. The pearls of the ancestral art are now 

 cast before swine, and are trampled on ; statues, temples, books, are 

 destroyed, or burnt, or lost. If an empire has been built, the degene- 

 rate race cannot sustain it. There is no wealth but life ; and if the 

 inherent quality of the life fails, neither battle-ships, nor libraries, nor 

 symphonies, nor Free Trade, nor Tariff Reform, nor anything else, will 

 save a nation. Empires and civilisations, then, may have fallen, despite 

 the strength and magnitude of the superstructure, because their living 

 foundations became weak ; and the bigger and heavier the superstruc- 

 ture, the less could it survive the failure of the foundations. If the 

 Fiji islanders des:enerate, there is little consequence ; if the breed of 



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