Mental Evolution. 499 



selection ; and unless we can do this the followers of Dr. 

 Weismann will not be satisfied. 



Still, general belief— which means the net result of one's 

 consideration of the subject — counts for something. We 

 must remember the question is one of origin, and not of 

 guidance. The guidance of human selection is unquestioned 

 and unquestionable. But when we consider the intellectual 

 progress of the last three centuries, and ask whether all 

 this has originated in fortuitous brain-variations, which 

 human selection has simply picked out from the total mass 

 of available material, an affirmative answer seems to me a 

 little difficult of acceptance. There seems to have been 

 a definite tendency to vary in this particular direction, a 

 general raising of the intellectual level, which is difficult to 

 account for unless it be due to the persistent employment 

 of the intellectual faculties. 



To put the matter in another way. I do not think that, 

 during the last three centuries, there has been a large 

 amount of elimination of the unintellectual. Such elimina- 

 tion as there has been of this nature has probably been 

 more than compensated by the slower rate of multiplication 

 of the intellectual classes. Elimination, then, in this 

 matter may be practically disregarded. But it is obvious 

 that selection, without the removal or exclusion of the non- 

 selected, does nothing to alter the general level * with regard 

 to the particular quality or faculty concerned. It is merely 

 a classification of the individuals in order of merit in this 

 particular respect. It is, in a word, a segregation-factor. 

 It arranges the individuals in classes, but it does not alter 

 the position of the mean around which they vary. 



Let me explain by means of an analogous case. Fifty 

 boys, who have been admitted to a public school, await 

 examination in a class-room. They are at present un- 

 classified, but there is a mean of ability among the whole 



* If elimination of the unintellectual (not necessarily of the unintelligent) 

 may be excluded, and if the unintellectual increase by natural generation 

 more rapidly than the intellectual, the general level of intellectuality mus f , 

 on Professor Weismann's principles, be steadily falling. 



