In a valuable work W. Schallmayer[762] has recently discussed the great importance of the offspring of talented persons in the improvement of the race, and has considered the details of psychical inheritance.
As in the entire animal world, so also in the human race, the feminine nature has a more conservative character, one more disinclined to variations, whether favourable or unfavourable, as contrasted with the more variable nature of the male, which is also more prone to submit to degenerative influences. For this reason, in declining races, we meet many more women free from degeneration than men. Carl Vogt, in a passage which appears to be very little known, writes on this subject in the following terms:[763]
“It is the women, my friend, who maintain the race, who for the longest time safeguard the type of the people in body and spirit, and for this reason they form the mirror at once of the future and of the past which are allotted to that people. You will no doubt have noticed how, in many races, there exists a disharmony between men and women, so that in one race the male and in another the female stands behind the other in physical beauty and in mental development. This relationship between the two sexes is precisely that from which we are able to learn the past and the future of the nation. Good and bad, advance and retrogression, are first undertaken by the man, and by him passed to the woman, whose conservative nature much more gradually yields to strange influences. But since the stages of mental culture through which a race passes are not only reflected in its bodily development, but actually depend upon this development, it is easy to understand that in a nature which is striving upwards, which we see in the process of advance towards better things, the men possess the advantage in the matter of beauty and of intellectual capacity; whereas when the race is a declining one, the advantages in these respects will lie with woman. If you find a race in which the women are beautiful, but as a rule the men are ugly and badly formed, you can with certainty conclude that this race has long since passed its culminating point in development, and has long been undergoing a process of decline.”
For racial biology it is at least equally important, if not even more important, that healthy, vigorous, and talented men should reproduce their kind, rather than that in love’s choice the corresponding qualities in women should be regarded as determinative. Racial biology, if it really wishes to obtain success in the breeding of humanity, is compelled to demand the abolition of the present evil coercive marriage morality, and, according to the suggestions of Nietzsche, von Ehrenfels, and others, will not hesitate, in certain cases, to regard polygamy as desirable, if only from this standpoint—that coercive marriage is the sole cause of the domination of “mammonism” in the sexual life, to the deleterious influence of which we have before alluded.[764]
Mammonism is dangerous if for this alone, because it involves the annihilation of the sense of sexual responsibility, and in consequence of this, natural love is rejected on one side, and all considerations of a racial hygienic nature are cast away on the other. The lack of both is the cause of degeneration.
[741] A. Hegar, “The Sexual Impulse” (Stuttgart, 1894).
[742] A. Ploetz, “Outlines of Racial Hygiene” (Berlin, 1895).
[743] R. Kossmann, “Breeding—Politics” (Schmargendorf—Berlin, 1905).
[744] Max Gruber, “Does Hygiene lead to Racial Degeneration?” published in the Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift, October 6 and 13, 1903.