III.
We have already alluded to Weismann's and Wallace's views, but there is one important aspect not yet touched.
If Weismann and Wallace are right, if natural selection be indeed the only factor used by nature in organic evolution and therefore available for use by Reason in human evolution, then alas for all our hopes of race-improvement, whether physical, mental, or moral! All enlightened schemes of physical culture and of hygiene, although directed indeed primarily for the strength, health, and happiness of the present generation, yet are sustained and ennobled by the conviction that the physical improvement of the individual, by inheritance enters into a similar improvement of the race. All our schemes of education, intellectual and moral, although certainly intended mainly for the improvement of the individual, are glorified by the hope that the race is also thereby gradually elevated. It is true that these hopes are usually extravagant; it is true that the whole improvement of the individuals of one generation is not carried over by inheritance into the next; it is true therefore that we cannot by education raise a lower race up to the plane of a higher race in a few generations; but there must be a small residuum, be it ever so small, carried forward by inheritance and accumulated from age to age, which enters into the slow growth of the race. If it be true that reason must direct the course of human evolution, and if it be also true that selection of the fittest is the only method available for that purpose; then, if we are to have any race-improvement at all, the dreadful law of destruction of the weak and helpless must with Spartan firmness be carried out voluntarily and deliberately. Against such a course all that is best in us revolts. The use of the Lamarckian factors, on the contrary, is not attended with any such revolting consequences. All that we call education, culture, training, is by the use of these. Our hopes of race-improvement therefore are strictly conditioned on the fact that the Lamarckian factors are still operative, that changes in the individual, if in useful direction, are to some extent inherited and accumulated in the race.