PREFACE. 



Mr. Herbert Spencer, and this importance may 

 be even greater than he imagined. 



Civilization largely sets aside the harsh but 

 ultimately salutary action of the great law of 

 Natural Selection without providing an efficient 

 substitute for preventing degeneracy. The sub- 

 stitute on which moralists and legislators rely 

 if they think on the matter at all is the 

 cumulative inheritance of the beneficial effects of 

 education, training, habits, institutions, and so 

 forth the inheritance, in short, of acquired 

 characters, or of the effects of use and disuse. 

 If this substitute is but a broken reed, then the 

 deeper thinkers who gradually teach the teachers 

 of the people, and ultimately even influence the 

 legislators and moralists, must found their 

 systems of morality and their criticisms of social 



and political laws and institutions and customs 

 and ideas on the basis of the Darwinian law 

 rather than on that of Lamarck. 



