122 



ARISTOCRACY AND EVOLUTION 



Book II 

 Chapter i 



A selfish 

 doctor, if 

 successful, is 

 greater than a 

 devoted 

 doctor, if 

 unsuccessful. 



The fact that 

 many men 

 who produce 

 no social 

 results seem 

 better and 

 more brilliant 

 than many 

 men who do 

 produce them, 

 makes some 

 argue that 

 these results 

 require no 

 greatness for 

 their produc- 

 tion. 



for nothing, and died in his unavailing efforts to 

 save his patients, whilst the other fled from the 

 infected district, and solacing himself at a distance 

 with a mistress and an excellent cook, invented a 

 medicine by which the disease could be warded off, 

 and proceeded to make a large fortune by selling it, 

 though the former as a man might be incalculably 

 better than the latter, the latter as an agent of 

 progress would be incalculably greater than the 

 former. Again, if two doctors tried to invent such 

 a medicine, and whilst the first succeeded the second 

 failed, the second, though he might have exerted 

 himself far more than the first, and have failed only 

 owing to some minute flaw in his faculties, would 

 be not only less great as an agent of progress than 

 the first, but he would not be practically an agent 

 of progress at all, any more than a man is an 

 agent in saving another from drowning if he merely 

 stretches a hand which the drowning man cannot 

 reach, and actually himself tumbles into the water 

 in doing so. 



This truth, which sounds brutal when plainly 

 stated, but is really little more than a sociological 

 truism, is constantly overlooked, and even indignantly 

 denied, by thinkers whose emotions are more 

 powerful than their minds. The way in which such 

 persons reason is very easily understood. They 

 see that a number of men by whom great social 

 results are produced men who make successful 

 inventions and who found great businesses are 

 narrow-minded, uncultivated, and contemptible in 



