EDUCATION AND SELECTION. 355 



Education should not be a simple acquisition of knowledge, but a 

 cultivation of living powers for the purpose of assuring the pref- 

 erence of the highest idea-forces. 



After psychological selection, internal to the individual, we 

 have to consider social selection, which takes place between dif- 

 ferent individuals, or between races or peoples. There are, for any 

 race, physiological and psychological essential conditions of supe- 

 riority. The race must first of all be physiologically strong, and 

 here only are the ordinary laws of selection applicable, because we 

 are in the domain of life. The sound mind can not exist except in 

 the sound body ; all the delicacies of mind are not worth as much 

 to a race as health, vigor, and fertility. Even geniuses can not be 

 born except of a strong race ; the intellectual faculties can not be 

 kept up long and advance, except among a vigorous people, and 

 selection can not be efficient and produce the best by nature a 

 necessary condition of all progress except in a fruitful and nu- 

 merous and consequently strong race. Whenever, therefore, we 

 overwork the mind at the expense of the body, we lower the phys- 

 iological, and therefore the intellectual, level of the race ; for gen- 

 erations physiologically weakened will sooner or later suffer the 

 weakening, with their cerebral power, of their mental capacity. 

 The laws of heredity are fatal : to bequeath impoverished organs 

 to children is to prepare for what Pascal would call the stultifica- 

 tion of the race at a more or less distant epoch. In the struggle 

 and selection of peoples as recorded in history, when young and 

 perhaps barbarian blood has not been infused with the aged body 

 of a nation, it has fallen steadily, become sterilized, and disap- 

 peared or declined, while other peoples were ascending. 



Instruction may, we think, lead to two kinds of results : either 

 in dynamic effects that is, augmentation of cerebral force or in 

 purely mechanical effects ; like scientific and literary routine. In 

 the former case, it acts upon heredity and can produce a hereditary 

 transmission of cerebral force ; in the second case, it does not act, 

 or it acts mischievously to the exhaustion of the nervous system. 

 It is intellectual force, not acquired knowledge, that is transmitted 

 by heredity from one generation to another. Hence the criterion 

 which we propose for estimating methods of education and teach- 

 ing ; if there is an augmentation of mental, moral, and aesthetic 

 force, the method is good ; if a simple storing up in the memory, 

 the method is bad, for the brain is not a storehouse to be filled, 

 but an organ to be fortified. 



The physical and mental inconveniences of overwork may, 

 therefore, very properly occupy attention at this time. Good 

 scholars those who wish to succeed in an examination or enter 

 certain schools are the ones who are overworked under our pres- 

 ent systems ; for the majority of pupils there is no overwork, but 



