“Certainly not! In the process of civilization, which has lasted for many thousands of years, our organization has not experienced any serious convulsion of its fundamental nature. Superficially only have the battles we have had to fight made any mark upon us.”
To a frightful extent in earlier times the great infective epidemic diseases decimated civilized humanity, to an extent which is hardly realized at the present day, and those of more powerful constitution were undoubtedly carried off quite as much as those endowed with weaker powers of resistance. Bubonic plague, small-pox, leprosy, the sweating sickness, scarlatina, cholera, and syphilis (which at its commencement was a far more severe disease than it is at the present day), have often annihilated the blossoms of youth; and yet mankind as a whole has not suffered therefrom. Formerly there were much more violent and obstinate nervous troubles than our modern “nervousness,” which, to a large extent, represents merely a phenomenon of adaptation, not a disease in the proper sense of the term. St. Vitus’s dance, the dancing mania, and similar psycho-nervous epidemics, disturbed medieval humanity, without, however, giving rise to any permanent injury, and without causing progressive degeneration. And the most frightful sexual excesses can do no harm to the strength of the nation.
With regard to this point, the reputed connexion between sexual excesses and the political downfall of a nation, Carl Bleibtreu[467] rightly remarks:
“Ancient Rome produced its greatest men during a period of moral degeneration. The finest blossoms of Hellenic civilization coincided with a period of fundamental immorality. We might easily urge that after Pericles, Phidias, Aristophanes, Euripides, Alcibiades, and Socrates, the decay of the Greek race began, notwithstanding the fact that much later in Greek history the vital force of the nation was proved by the appearance of men of the first rank, such as Alexander, Aristotle, and Demosthenes. But this rejoinder does not help us much, for in the earliest days of Greek history, in the legal codes of Solon and Lycurgus, we find the most notable and clear indications that precisely in respect of sexual relationship, and more especially in regard to marriage and the procreation of children, the morals of this fresh and youthful race were disordered to the greatest possible extent.
“Just the same do we find it at the time of the Italian renascence and at the time of the Hohenstaufen dynasty—a complete confusion of sexual relationships. The eighteenth century, also, notwithstanding all the justified jeremiads of Rousseau regarding the widespread unnaturalness of the time, and notwithstanding all the sorrows of the young Werther, was distinguished by the production of an incredible abundance of men of genius; and in contemporary France, the country which was most severely affected by this moral decay, there flourished the generation to which such men as Mirabeau and Napoleon belonged—men whose unparalleled vitality influences us to this moment.”
Finally, I must refer to two leading authors of recent years, Eli Metchnikoff and Georg Hirth, whose writings exhibit a remarkable similarity in respect of general philosophical foundation. Both have energetically opposed the unfounded fantasies of degeneration (there exists also a justified campaign against the continuously effective causes of degeneration in the form of alcohol, syphilis, etc.), and both have advocated a belief in life and in the life-force.
In his work “The Nature of Man” (English translation by Chalmers Mitchell; Heinemann, 1903), Metchnikoff advances an “optimistic philosophy,” in opposition to the pessimistic degenerative theory of our time, of which latter P. J. Möbius may be regarded as the chief advocate, and he proves how the imperfections and “disharmonies” of the human organism may give place to a further development and perfectibility of human nature, and this precisely in connexion with culture and civilization. It is now that humanity first begins really to live.[468] Mankind has not degenerated in consequence of civilization, but has, on the contrary, by means of civilization, first attained the possibility of establishing “physiological old age” and “physiological death.” Our device is not backwards, but forwards! The pessimists cry out: “Existence has no meaning! For what purpose do we live, and for what purpose do we die?” This dreadful “for what purpose” with which Friedrich von Hellwald concludes his history of civilization, disturbs day by day emotional minds. Metchnikoff proves that this problem is connected with the existence of the disharmonies of human nature. But evolution continues to transform these disharmonies into harmonies (“orthobiosis”). Thus the aim of human existence lies in “the completion of the entire physiological cycle of life with a normal old age, so that, with the cessation of the instinct to live, and with the appearance of the instinct for natural death, the cycle comes to an end.” This is, to a certain extent, the scientific formulation of the “superman” of Nietzsche, who based upon quite similar considerations his opposition to the hypothesis of degeneration, and who, out of the disharmonies, imperfections, and pains of life, also created the conviction of a progressive evolution, and thus, like Metchnikoff, thoroughly affirmed life. Metchnikoff’s ideal human being of the future is realizable, but only by means of the principles of science and intelligent culture.
Similar views to those of Metchnikoff are advanced by Georg Hirth. He, above all, has introduced into science the most felicitous conception of “hereditary enfranchisement.”[469] Thus to the pessimistic degeneration theories and the psychical paralysis evoked by the idea of “hereditary taint” (we now hear the expression from every mouth), Hirth opposes a word of power, a word expressing “an energetic opposing stream of tendency.” Thus the incontestable fact finds simple expression, that
“The requirements of all individuals through millions of generations constitute an inalienable, progressively influential common possession of the whole of humanity, an impulsive force based upon natural law, which marches victoriously forward over the sins and failures of individuals.... That is to say, that in our entire organism, so long as it continues to live, in addition to the disturbing influences which we have inherited or have acquired by our own faults, there exists also a mass of old and new constructive influences, which work towards the restitution of the former condition.... Enfranchisement by means of primevally old, healthy, and strong reproductive cells is stronger than the quite recent tainting by means of weakly and diseased germs. If it were not so, the entire human race would long since have passed away, for there can hardly exist a single family tree at the foot of which there are not somewhere worms gnawing.”
I cannot here examine more closely the extremely interesting foundation of this view, which rightly places in the foreground the capacity for self-regeneration, for the removal of morbid vital stimuli, and their replacement by new and healthy vital stimuli, and which notably limits the extension of hereditary “tainting.” The conclusion which Hirth draws from this view is identical with that of Metchnikoff—namely, that our life remains capable of upward progress, a view which Hirth everywhere happily employs in his battle “with the forces of obscurity and degeneration.”