266 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



Darwinian hypothesis in the West was to undermine 

 and discredit this conception. There was, of course, 

 no doubt as to the transmission of inborn qualities 

 by heredity in human beings just as in animals and 

 in plants. But this fact came to obscure almost 

 entirely to Darwinians the immensely more import- 

 ant fact that the qualities upon which efficiency 

 and Power rest in collective evolution as distinct 

 from individual evolution are qualities of character 

 which are almost exclusively imposed and trans- 

 mitted through social heredity. For a period of 

 years the fact was completely lost sight of in 

 science that the upward progress of the world 

 in civilization rested on qualities in the individual 

 imposed on the individual from without, and not on 

 the nature of ancestral heredity inborn within him. 



The influence of the retrograde Darwinian con- 

 ception spread with lightning-like rapidity through- 

 out Western thought. Darwinians like Galton, 

 through a series of writings which attained wide 

 publicity, fixed general attention in a marked manner 

 on the nature of inborn heredity and brought forward 

 ambitious schemes for the improvement of the race, 

 conceived, not as in the past as dependent on the 

 training and education of the young, but on success 

 in selecting and breeding from the required strains 

 of heredity in individuals after the manner of 



