152 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



To this contribution of Mr. Wallace's Drummond 

 adds the remark that the advent of reason involves the 

 arrest of the body. Natural selection, it has been im- 

 plied, is turning its attention to the mind. Drummond 

 asks us to consider how this affects bodily evolution. It 

 will terminate physical or animal progress. Man has no 

 more need of an improved body ; he uses improved 

 rational methods. In particular he supplements his 

 body by the use of tools. But if man adds new 

 resources to the resources of his body, he also 

 counteracts many of its defects, e.g. he counteracts 

 defective eyesight by the use of spectacles. There is a 

 danger here ; for it is implied that natural selection 

 does not kill off defective human types as it kills off 

 defective animal types. We shall even be told by 

 Weismann that, natural selection ceasing to operate, we 

 ought to postulate not merely the arrest of the body, 

 but its retrogression. Man might not retrograde as a 

 whole ; body plus reason he might become a more 

 effective creature in civilised times than he was in 

 savage or barbarous ages ; but what of his body ? 

 Confessedly, its advance has been arrested. Is it not 

 inevitable that it should have receded, as civilisation 

 has been developed by reason ? If we tried to verify 

 this suggestion by a reference to facts, we should prob- 

 ably meet with a good deal of evidence on both sides. 

 Except the few professional athletes, civilised men are 

 poor creatures physically in comparison with the higher 

 savages. Whole faculties have gone amissing, and others 

 have left the merest aborted remnants. Yet the civilised 

 man displays much physical toughness in the ordeal of 

 disease, while the " noble savage " breaks down. 



Before leaving this point for the present, we ought 

 to refer to its bearing on the question of man's place in 



