470 Darwinism and Sociology 



Social Selection generally works against the trend of Natural 

 Selection. Vacher de Lapouge— following up an observation by 

 Broca on the point — enumerates the various institutions, or customs, 

 such as the celibacy of priests and military conscription, which cause 

 elimination or sterilisation of the bearers of certain superior qualities, 

 intellectual or physical. In a more general way he attacks the 

 democratic movement, a movement, as P. Bourget says, which is 

 " anti-physical " and contrary to the natural laws of progress ; though 

 it has been inspired "by the dreams of that most visionary of all 

 centuries, the eighteenth 1 ." The "Equality" which levels down and 

 mixes (justly condemned, he holds, by the Comte de Gobineau), 

 prevents the aristocracy of the blond dolichocephales from holding 

 the position and playing the part which, in the interests of all, should 

 belong to them. Otto Ammon, in his Natural Selection in Man, 

 and in The Social Order and its Natural Bases 2 , defended analogous 

 doctrines in Germany ; setting the curve representing frequency of 

 talent over against that of income, he attempted to show that all 

 democratic measures which aim at promoting the rise in the social 

 scale of the talented are useless, if not dangerous ; that they only 

 increase the panmixia, to the great detriment of the species and of 

 society. 



Among the aristocratic theories which Darwinism has thus in- 

 spired we must reckon that of Nietzsche. It is well known that in 

 order to complete his philosophy he added biological studies to his 

 philological ; and more than once in his remarks upon the Wille zur 

 Macht he definitely alludes to Darwin ; though it must be confessed 

 that it is generally in order to proclaim the insufficiency of the 

 processes by which Darwin seeks to explain the genesis of species. 

 Nevertheless, Nietzsche's mind is completely possessed by an ideal 

 of Selection. He, too, has a horror of panmixia. The naturalists' 

 conception of " the fittest " is joined by him to that of the " hero " 

 of romance to furnish a basis for his doctrine of the Superman. 

 Let us hasten to add, moreover, that at the very moment when 

 support was being sought in the theory of Selection for the various 

 forms of the aristocratic doctrine, those same forms were being 

 battered down on another side by means of that very theory. 

 Attention was drawn to the fact that by virtue of the laws which 

 Darwin himself had discovered isolation leads to etiolation. There 

 is a risk that the privilege which withdraws the privileged elements 

 of Society from competition will cause them to degenerate. In fact, 

 Jacoby in his Studies in Selection, in connexion with Heredity in 



1 V. de Lapouge, Les Selections sociales, p. 259, Paris, 1896. 



2 Die natilrliche Auslese beim Menschen, Jena, 1893 ; Die Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre 

 natiirlichen Grundlagen. Entwurf einer Sozialanthropologie, Jena, 1896. 



