SOME POPULAR FALLACIES 



certainty, upon a wave of progress which is none 

 of our raising, we must also abjure the contrary 

 error, which consists in rehearsing the base degrees 

 by which we did ascend, and assuming our bestial 

 origin to condemn us to irredeemable bestiality. 

 This, as has well been said, is like setting forth to 

 tell a good story and leaving out the point. The 

 sound inference is surely that if the beast can 

 become human, man may become superhuman. 

 What the beast has done, man can do. 



Furthermore, we still suffer from a fallacy which 

 may be traced to Nietzsche, and of which the 

 accredited philosopher of the many -headed in 

 Anglo-Saxondom is a typical representative. The 

 Nietzscheans take the law of the survival of the 

 fittest the struggle for life, the law of egoism 

 as the basis of scientific morality, or, rather, de 

 nial of morality, and close their eyes to the equal 

 ly salient correlative law of altruism the &quot;strug 

 gle for the life of others,&quot; to use the phrase of 

 Drummond. This their myopia and their prej 

 udice against Christianity enable them to do, de 

 spite the fact upon which I propose to insist until 

 I wear out, that without altruism no human being 

 ever survived or ever will survive for one week 

 after birth. Thus, using the word in two senses, 

 I say that to abolish humanity would be to 

 abolish humanity. When I hear of a single baby, 

 past, present, or to come, that lived or shall live 

 for seven days without the care of another human 



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