Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/384

 368 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

age who may be haunted with a wish that he had not killed his dog or companion in a fit of anger, to a Jean Valjean in Les Mist- rabies, who goes back to prison in order to save from pursuit an inferior specimen of his fellow human creatures ; or to the mourn- ful soliloquy of Wolseyover the mistake of self-asserting ambi- tion. In fact, I doubt whether we can do anything more than construct a series of bridges as stages from the one phase to the other.

The advance of the human race has been marked conspicu- ously by the growth of intelligence. And a finite mind who had undertaken to prophesy by the laws of evolution what would have been the outcome through this growth of knowledge and increas- ing supremacy of intelligence, would have assumed, as man came to know more and apply his mind more fully to human conduct, while keeping the same human nature, that the tendency would have been for him to pursue a course of extirpation toward the physically weak. Sentiment would naturally have given way, one would suppose, to practical schemes for carrying out what we might call nature's laws. On the physical side, it is against the interests of the race for the weak to survive.

And, in point of fact, there is an indication of this very line of opinion appearing here and there today among those who adopt the theory of evolution as explaining the appearance of conscience, and who take the laws by which the human race has been evolved in the past as the lines according to which the human creature should be guided in the future. Here and there a philosopher of this type attacks most vigorously the whole sys- tem of the modern world in its care for the weaker specimens of the race ; in its philanthropy, its hospital systems, or its schemes for popular education. They assure us that this is all a mistake and fundamentally wrong, because against the laws which have brought the human race into existence.

But while here and there an instance of this kind occurs, the human race, as it advances in intelligence, has been pursuing pre- cisely the opposite course. More care is taken of the weak than ever before. The tendency, which was so feeble in early times, to treat every man as an end in himself, is growing rather than declining.