EVOLUTION THEORIES 215 



Germany ; with the victories and hegemony of 

 Prussia, the renewed claims of its aristocracy 

 also; and, above all, with its doctrine of race, 

 political and anthropological combined. The 

 intermediate step between this ruling Prussian 

 world of action and Weismann's ascendancy 

 in speculative biology is indicated by the 

 widely diffused doctrine of Count Gobineau, 

 consciously and avowedly bio-social as this 

 has been. All these movements alike have 

 now found eloquent, though hardly scientific, 

 expression in Houston Stewart Chamberlain, 

 whose contemporary vogue in Germany is 

 thus earned and explained. 



LIMITATIONS YET ADVANTAGES OF SOCIAL 

 OUTLOOK. But the reader may ere now be 

 saying : If this be true, if biological doctrines 

 be even half as much projections of their social 

 age as is here suggested, what becomes of the 

 independent scientific value they have claimed, 

 and which we are asked to grant ? Is your 

 science merely a new anthropomorphism ? 

 and if so how does it differ from the mytholo- 

 gical accounts of Nature it claims to displace ? 



The answer is not so difficult as it seems, 

 the result not so unsatisfactory after all. 

 The independence of the doctrines of any 

 science from the social life, the prevalent 

 thought of the generation in which they arise, 



