PREFACE IX 



moulder of the mental clay, have best adapted the 

 internal dynamic relations to the external. Hence 

 the inevitable decadence and weariness of the 

 human race ; since highly strung organisations, 

 worn out by overwork and misery, lose their 

 power of originating, or leave behind a miserable 

 posterity decimated by disease ; whilst, on the 

 other hand, the drones, the unadaptable, the poor 

 in spirit, surfeited with pleasure, produce a robust 

 offspring, thus perpetuating the dead-weight of the 

 social machine. 



For civilised man, therefore, the principle of 

 the selection of the fittest does not hold good, 

 nor does the better cast prevail in the struggle for 

 existence ; on the contrary, as Dr Lluria shrewdly 

 remarks, adaptation adjusts itself to an artificial 

 extra-organic condition quite unknown to the rest 

 of the animal world, and an inexhaustible cause 

 of weariness, retrogression, and false organisation 

 for instance, the acquisition and enjoyment of 

 capital with the sole view of guaranteeing the 

 perpetual sloth of the few and the incessant in- 

 crease of the parasites of labour. So that the 

 human species, eternally oscillating between 

 destitution and superfluity, anaemia and plethora, 

 becomes something strange and incomprehensible ; 

 a kind of fool, cursed with the monomania of con- 

 demning others to hunger in order to procure for 



