Precisely in proportion as a society improves the opportunities of the able to rise, it must accelerate the elimination of fitness in the racial stock. So long as a relatively rigid social order rendered it almost impossible for ability to rise from the ranks, reservoirs of ability could accumulate unseen in the lower social strata, and burst forth in times of need, as in the French Revolution: but the more successfully a carrière ouverte aux talents is instituted, the more surely are these strata kept drained, and incapacitated from retrieving the waste of ability in the upper layers of society. Now it is doubtless true that the primary need of society is to find persons capable of conducting its affairs ably, and that a social order which does not allow ability to rise is therefore bad: but nations cannot with impunity so order themselves as to eliminate the very qualities they most admire and desire, and must husband their resources in men as in the other sources of their wealth and welfare.[19]
That is to say, it did not matter much if in former times the nobility did tend to die out in a few generations, for in hereditable ability they were not much above the average. But in the more just regime that we are trying to introduce, especially in America, when the opportunities for higher education and advancement are extended to the gifted of all classes, it will be disastrous if the professional and well-to-do classes fail to contribute their share to the future population, for it means a continuous reversal of the method of the survival of the fittest by which evolution has been accomplished. This is not a law that man can repeal however he may disregard it. So it happens that civilized societies tend to die at the top and the human race makes little or no progress in native ability. As Schiller says:
The inventor of the wheel or even of a new mode of chipping flints may well have been as great a genius as the human race has produced, and it accords well with this that the early paleolithic races seem to have possessed a cranial capacity, not less, but greater than our own. For in the dim red dawn of man the fool-killing apparatus of nature was terribly effective, and society could do little to mitigate its horrors and to protect its inefficient members.
The injustice, and what is more important, the injurious effects of the present distribution of honors and emoluments he exposes in his article on "National Self-Selection":
Is it not nonsense to say that the Archbishop of Canterbury is paid £15,000 a year and Prof. J. J. Thomson seven or eight hundred, because the persons fitted to perform the latter's functions are twenty times as common as those suited to the former's? Is not the real reason plainly that the former is the beneficiary of a long social development which has liberally endowed the Church, while the social appreciation of the value of science is only just beginning, and has not yet raised the makers of new truths to a par with the custodians of time-honoured revelations? Our example, however, draws attention to a very general fact, viz., that the social position of various functions is very largely the product of past valuations which have persisted from mere habit. Hence their present salaries do not really prove that an Archbishop is twenty times as valuable to a nation as a scientific genius, or thrice as precious as a Premier, nor even that men now think so. How many of us, for example, really now believe that mere descent from an illiterate medieval baron attests sufficient merit to entitle a man to a hereditary seat in the House of Lords? If we continued to value fighting qualities as highly as of yore, we should promote our actual fighting men. When we want really to defend the House of Lords, we point to its sagacity in gauging the will of the people and to the economic value of its attractiveness for foreign heiresses.
Hence one of the chief needs of a society which desires to reconstitute itself on eugenical principles is a thorough revision of social status. It must bring the social position of various services into closer agreement with their present value. And it must induce a greater feeling of responsibility about the popular valuations and transvaluations of functions, which are constantly exalting the position of the caterers to individual pleasures above the consolidators of man's permanent welfare. It is not good for a society that a cricketer or a prize-fighter or a dancer should be esteemed and rewarded more highly than the man who discovers a cure for malaria or cancer.[20]
The humanistic view of metaphysics Schiller expresses in the preface to the 1910 edition of his earliest work "Riddles of the Sphinx."
Practically a system of metaphysics, with whatever pretensions to pure thought and absolute rationality it may start is always in the end one man's personal vision about the universe, and the "metaphysical craving" often so strong in the young is nothing but the desire to tell the universe what one thinks of it. Of course, the tale may be worth telling if told well.
This describes the "Riddles of the Sphinx" exactly. In it the youthful Schiller tells the universe what he thinks of it and it is told well. But his thoughts have changed in the twenty-five years since this volume was published so that even in its revised form it does not so well express his views as do his later volumes, "Humanism" and "Studies in Humanism", of which revised editions were brought out in 1912.
The doctrine known as Absolute Idealism was, Schiller explains, imported from Germany, "soon after its demise in its native country", for the purpose of counteracting the anti-religious developments of science. But the abstract conception of the Absolute is, in his opinion, of no value to religion or anything else. The pragmatic demand for God is, first, as "a human moral principle of help and justice", and second, as "an aid to the intellectual comprehension of the universe", but the metaphysical Absolute satisfies neither of these cravings, for it is too impersonal to help anybody and too general to explain anything.
In his chapter on "Absolutism and the Dissociation of Personality"[21] he generously offers his aid to the idealistic monists who have difficulty in conceiving how the One became the Many and why the individualistic minds included in the Universal Mind should be so antagonistic. Schiller suggests that it is an analogous case to the dissociation of that celebrated Boston lady "Miss Beauchamp" into several secondary personalities. But he admits that it is "a little startling at first to think of the Absolute as morbidly dissociated or even as downright mad", especially since in the case of the Absolute there is no outsider, like Doctor Morton Prince, to put the parts together again.