470 Darwinism and Sociology 
Social Selection generally works against the trend of Natural 
Selection. Vacher de Lapouge—following up an observation by 
Broca on the point—enumerates the various institutions, or customs, 
such as the celibacy of priests and military conscription, which cause 
elimination or sterilisation of the bearers of certain superior qualities, 
intellectual or physical. In a more general way he attacks the 
democratic movement, a movement, as P. Bourget says, which is 
“anti-physical” and contrary to the natural laws of progress; though 
it has been inspired “by the dreams of that most visionary of all 
centuries, the eighteenth.” The “Equality” which levels down and 
mixes (justly condemned, he holds, by the Comte de Gobineau), 
prevents the aristocracy of the blond dolichocephales from holding 
the position and playing the part which, in the interests of all, should 
belong to them. Otto Ammon, in his Natural. Selection in Man, 
and in The Social Order and its Natural Bases?, defended analogous 
doctrines in Germany ; setting the curve representing frequency of 
talent over against that of income, he attempted to show that all 
democratic measures which aim at promoting the rise in the social 
scale of the talented are useless, if not dangerous; that they only 
increase the panmixia, to the great detriment of the species and of 
society. 
Among the aristocratic theories which Darwinism has thus in- 
spired we must reckon that of Nietzsche. It is well known that in 
order to complete his philosophy he added biological studies to his 
philological ; and more than once in his remarks upon the Wille zur 
Macht he definitely alludes to Darwin ; though it must be confessed 
that it is generally in order to proclaim the insufficiency of the 
processes by which Darwin seeks to explain the genesis of species. 
Nevertheless, Nietzsche's mind is completely possessed by an ideal 
of Selection. He, too, has a horror of panmixia. The naturalists’ 
conception of “the fittest” is joined by him to that of the “hero” 
of romance to furnish a basis for his doctriné of the Superman. 
Let us hasten to add, moreover, that at the very moment when 
support was being sought in the theory of Selection for the various 
forms of the aristocratic doctrine, those same forms were being 
battered down on another side by means of that very theory. 
Attention was drawn to the fact that by virtue of the laws which 
Darwin himself had discovered isolation leads to etiolation. There 
is a risk that the privilege which withdraws the privileged elements 
of Society from competition will cause them to degenerate. In fact, 
Jacoby in his Studies in Selection, in connexion with Heredity in 
1 V. de Lapouge, Les Sélections sociales, p. 259, Paris, 1896. 
2 Die natilirliche Auslese beim Menschen, Jena, 1893; Die Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre 
natiirlichen Grundlagen. Entwurf einer Sozialanthropologie, Jena, 1896. 
