350 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



stand and knowingly to desire the realisation of tliat which, 

 partly through necessity and partly through accident, has up 

 till now been attained here and there — that is, the conditions 

 essential to the breeding of a stronger species. We are now in a 

 position to create the conditions under which such progress is 

 possible. Up till now education has always had in \dew the 

 advantages of society as such, not the possible advantages of 

 future generations, but the actual advantages of the generations 

 of to-day. ... If the quantity of social force were greater, it 

 would be possible to deduct a certain quantity of this force, 

 which would no longer be employed in the service of the society 

 of to-day, but which would be reserved for the benefit of future 

 generations." ^ 



The nursing and care of young children who are hereditarily 

 predisposed to tuberculosis, or to cancer, or to any other disease, 

 is a most necessary and excellent thing, provided we bear in 

 mind the fact that such children should not be allowed to repro- 

 duce. In other words, care for the individual can, and, indeed, 

 must, coexist with care for the race. The sickly and weak 

 individual can have his life prolonged — so far there is nothing to 

 criticise, and only a great deal of charity and kindness to praise ; 

 but this sickly and weak individual must be prevented from 

 giving origin to a fresh crop of individuals similar to himself, if 

 not worse. Sympathy for individual suffering must not hinder 

 us from taking measures to prevent that suffering from being 

 hereditarily transmitted by the reproduction of the sufferer. 

 The greater the number of weak individuals born, the more is the 

 amount of vitality reduced ; and as the very essence of life is its 

 full expansion, and as vitaUty is an essential requisite of all 

 expansion, the multiplication of weakhngs and invalids is an 

 infraction of the most fundamental law of life. 



Summing up the results arrived at in this chapter, we may say, 

 therefore, that those who proclaim the biological degeneracy of 

 1 r. Nietzsche, Werke, xv. 413. Leipzig, 1901. 



