THE PAGAN ETHIC 77 



Yet it was Gallon, with no higher equipment 

 of knowledge than thus indicated and the subject 

 in the past of so misleading an illusion about a 

 matter so fundamental, who now proposed to enter 

 upon the stupendous task of reconstructing civiliza- 

 tion by the scientific breeding of the race ! As might 

 be expected, Gallon's conception of civilization in 

 such circumstances was so elementary that there was 

 no place in it for moral standards or for any of those 

 problems of the responsibility of the individual for 

 the universal which have distracted the human mind 

 since the dawn of knowledge and in which centre all 

 the meaning and all the laws of the social integra- 

 tion which humanity is undergoing in civilization. 



I was present as one of the members of the 

 Council at the meeting of the Sociological Society, 

 in London, at which Gallon first made this scheme 

 public. I remember the day as one of the landmarks 

 of my life. It was the point at which the knowledge 

 first came home to me : 



(1) That Darwinism was the sum and flower of 

 the peculiar science of the West, a compound of 

 astonishing learning and incomparable ignorance : 



(2) That the characteristic knowledge of the West 

 which had been reduced to science was but the 

 organized form of the doctrine of the supremacy of 

 material force : 



