DARWINISM AND POLITICS. 43 



; ; 



appears to be on the increase, i.e. the Lamarck- V 

 ian doctrine is tending- to disappear from the 

 evolution theory and the Darwinian principle 

 of natural selection acting- upon " spontaneous " 

 variations is coming to be accepted as the sole 

 factor in organic evolution. 1 " Use and disuse" 

 seem at first sio-ht so much easier to understand 

 than " natural selection," that it will probably 

 be some time before they lose their hold on the 

 imagination. The temptation undoubtedly is 

 to discuss the question at once in its applica- 

 tion to human beings, but it can be more safely 

 discussed with regard to the lower animals, 

 both because the opportunities of experiment 

 are better and because there is less risk of bias 

 in forming inferences. In the case of human 



beings it is so very difficult to distinguish what 



... . 



is due to inheritance in the restricted sense of 



race-influence from what is due to imitation, 

 early training, etc., which constitute inheritance 

 certainly but in a wider and a sociological, not 

 a merely biological, sense. When people point 

 to the remarkable way in which children re- 

 semble their parents, they are apt to forget that 

 children as a rule are not merely the children 

 1 See below, pp. 87, 88. 



