Heredity, Variation and Genius 27 



- r-? 

 elemental passions were extinguished, for without 



them the qualities of moral being would want ; 

 root ; they could not grow as they do by natural 

 process of development, and blossom into fit 

 spiritualizations of the sensual ; for the animal 

 nature is the crude material upon which social ^ 

 culture impresses the moral elegancies.* Whether 

 the disappearance of disused organs in the species 

 is owing to the direct inheritance of the wasting 

 effects of parental disuse, as Lamarck supposed, 

 or really, as Weismann maintains, to the con- 

 sequences of Panmixia whereby the average 

 structure is steadily lowered in the species because, 

 being of no benefit to the individuals possessing 

 them, they are no longer fostered by natural 

 selection, that is a question which is still actively 

 disputed. Disputed too perhaps with over-eager 



* To despise and maltreat his lower animal nature and to 

 strive to rise out of it, even to get rid of it, may be logical in 

 one who believes in the fall of man from a high state of spiritual 

 being sometime on earth ; but is absurd intellectually and 

 demoralizing in him who believes that mankind from its begin- 

 ning has been rising and is destined to go on rising to higher 

 being ; whose ideal is not a dim memory of a sinless state to be 

 painfully regained, but an obscure aspiration to a blessed state 

 of perfection to be achieved and enjoyed. He must respect 

 and wisely use the forces of his animal passions, perceiving and 

 acknowledging that his sins and sufferings as well as his virtues 

 and joys have had their proper function in the process of his 

 natural evolution — and will be present in its perfected essence. 

 If man had been all virtue and no vice, he would probably have 

 been extinct long ago. 



