334 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



even thougli it continues to come far short of meet- 

 ing its own standards, which are with each genera- 

 tion placed in advance over the standards of any , 

 previous age. 



While in a narrower sense this new law of ethics 

 places the human race above the law of natural selec- 

 tion, in its broader sense man cannot free him- 

 self from the application of that all-j^ervading law. 

 Families and races are constantly disappearing be- 

 fore the inexorable law of failure to reproduce ; and 

 the problem as to what families will continue to exist 

 and what ones will be exterminated by failure to 

 meet the conditions of nature depends upon many 

 complicated conditions. One of the important ones 

 is clearly the power of the family or of the race to 

 act in accordance with the new principles of ethics. 

 Evolution of man has been and will constantly con- 

 tinue to be characterized by the survival of such fam- 

 ilies and such races as have impulses in their nature 

 best adapted to form strong social organisms. 

 Those races whose impulses lead them to live in 

 constant opposition with each other have fallen, 

 while those whose innate impulses have led them to 

 love society, as well as to preserve peace and har- 

 mony in the tribe or in the kingdom, are the races 

 that have succeeded. The race that has the most 

 delicate moral sense, the most sensitive conscience, is 

 the race whose impulses lead it toward the strongest 

 concentration, the strongest unity. It is such races 

 as this that natural selection has produced and will 

 in the long run j^reserve. From such races there 

 have been slowlv eliminated the families in which the 

 impulses are out of harmony with this type of social 

 organism, and hence in this far-reaching way nat- 



