104 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



The idea that civilization is based on fixed and 

 permanent heredity in the individual has been in 

 recent times in a special sense an overwhelming pre- 

 possession with that large group of modern writers 

 in all Western lands who have attempted to apply 

 pure biological conceptions to theories of civiliza- 

 tion. The assumption that civilization rests on a 

 great intellectual superiority, imagined as inborn in 

 civilized man as contrasted with the savage, was the 

 fundamental preoccupation of Gal ton's mind in his 

 discussion of the difference between men of the ad- 

 vanced and the less advanced races. It was the 

 assumption of a corresponding great intellectual 

 inferiority inborn in uncivilized man which led him 

 to his notorious comparison of the mental traits of 

 the Demara race with those of his dog, in which he 

 told us that taking the two, the dog and the Demara, 

 " the comparison reflected no great honour on the 

 man." 1 In all his eugenic imaginings Galton 

 remained strongly under the influence of this con- 

 ception of inborn heredity. 



Bateson similarly may be seen to have his mind 

 fixed in the same direction in his dream of civiliza- 

 tion relapsing into a kind of caste system, founded 

 upon inborn faculties. Bagehot had a conception 

 of inborn heredity permanently in view in his 



1 Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa. 



