Social Environment and Moral Progress. Alfred Russel Wallace

in his composition. . . . The natives are very strict in obeying their laws and customs, even under great temptation. The horror of marrying a woman within the prohibited degrees of relationship, the extreme grief they manifest at the death of children or relatives, and sometimes even for white men, as illustrated by the native boy who was the sole companion of the unfortunate Kennedy when he was murdered, are sufficient to indicate that they possess affections and a sense of right and wrong not very different from our own."

      The fact that the physical characteristics of the Australians are substantially those of the Caucasian race in its lowest types has led me to conclude that these interesting people may have been descended from much more civilised remote ancestors, and are thus an example of degradation rather than of survival.2

      Many other illustrations of both intelligence and morality are met with among savage races in all parts of the world; and these, taken as a whole, show a substantial identity of human character, both moral and emotional, with no marked superiority in any race or country. In intellect, where the greatest advance is supposed to have occurred, this may be wholly due to the cumulative effect of successive acquisitions of knowledge handed down from age to age. Euclid and Archimedes were probably the equals of any of our greatest mathematicians of to-day, while the architecture of Greece, of India, and of Central America is little inferior to mediæval Gothic. But none of these, though so different in style, can be said to prove any real advance in intellectual power from that of the builders of the much more ancient temples and pyramids of Egypt. This latter country, too, in its high material civilisation and its remarkable religious system, shows itself the equal of any that has succeeded it.

      CHAPTER VII

      A SELECTIVE AGENCY NEEDED TO IMPROVE CHARACTER

      The general result of the facts and arguments now set forth in the merest outline leads us to conclude that there has been no definite advance of morality from age to age, and that even the lowest races, at each period, possessed the same intellectual and moral nature as the higher. The manifestations of this essentially human nature in habits and conduct were often very diverse, in accordance with diversities of the social and moral environment. This is quite in accordance with the now well-established doctrine that the essential character of man, intellectual, emotional, and moral, is inherent in him from birth; that it is subject to great variation from individual to individual; and that its manifestations in conduct can be modified in a very high degree by the influence of public opinion and systematic teaching. These latter changes, however, are not hereditary, and it follows that no definite advance in morals can occur in any race unless there is some selective or segregative agency at work.

      As there is a great amount of misconception on this subject some explanation may be advisable. Many well-educated and intelligent persons seem to think that whatever characters or faculties are hereditary are also necessarily cumulative. They hear that mental as well as physical characteristics are hereditary; their own observation tells them that there are musical families as well as tall families. They hear that the late Sir Francis Galton wrote a book on Hereditary Genius, and perhaps they have read it; but they do not observe that neither he nor anyone else has proved that genius of any kind is cumulative, that is that a man or woman of genius will have, on the average, some one or more children with a greater amount of that special power or faculty than their own. The very contrary of this is really the case. The more a person's talent or mental power is above the average the less chance there is that any of his or her children will have still more of that power than he has. A really great poet, or painter, or musician, appears suddenly in a family of mediocre ability or of no ability at all in that special direction. A few examples may be instructive.

      Sir William Herschell was the son of a German musician, and was himself a musician by profession; but he became an astronomical genius, one of the greatest of his age. His son, Sir John Herschell, was a very clever man, with advantages of education and position. He followed his father as an astronomer, and was a great mathematician, but is never considered to be equal to his father. Darwin's most eminent son was a mathematician, not a naturalist.

      The reason of this is that heredity follows the law of "recession to mediocrity." This is, that all groups of living things vary around an average or mean as regards each of their characters; and those near the average are always numerous, while as we approach the extremes in either direction the numbers become less and less. Families follow the same law. If you take a family for three or four generations, including perhaps some hundreds of persons, some will be short, some tall; but the majority will be near the mean, and the tallest of all will be less likely to have taller descendants than themselves than those nearer the average. But the children of the tallest, though generally shorter than their parents, will still tend to be above the average height.

      When a character is so useful to its possessor in the struggle for existence as to be of what is termed "survival value," then those that vary most above the average will be preserved or selected generation after generation as long as the increase is useful.

      It is because the higher intellectual or moral powers are so rarely of life-preserving value, and are not unfrequently the reverse, that they are not cumulative, though they are hereditary.

      With this explanation we will now proceed to examine somewhat closely our moral position as a nation; what is the nature of our social environment; how it came to be what it is, and what lessons we may learn from it.

      CHAPTER VIII

      ENVIRONMENT DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

      During the eighteenth century our material civilisation, which had long been almost stationary, began to advance with the growth of the physical sciences, but at first with extreme slowness. The earliest steps were made by the application of machinery to some of the domestic arts. Some refinements were made in the manners and customs of our daily life; but there were few, if any, indications of permanent or widespread change, either for better or worse, in our intellectual or moral nature.

      The nineteenth century, however, saw the initiation of a great change in the economic environment due to the rapid invention of labour-saving machinery; which, with the equally rapid application of steam power, led to an increase of wealth production such as had never been known on the earth before. During the same period new modes of locomotion were brought into daily use, the facilities for inter-communication were increased a hundred-fold, scientific discoveries opened up to us new and unthought-of mysteries of the universe, and the whole earth was ransacked for its treasures, both vegetable and mineral, to an extent that surpassed all that had been accomplished since the dawn of civilisation.

      1

      See Character and Life, edited by P. L. Parker, pp. 19-31. (Williams and Norgate; November, 1912.)

      2

      See my Australia and New Zealand, Chap. V., "The Australian Aborigines," where this view was first set forth

1

See Character and Life,

2

See my Australia and New Zealand, Chap. V., "The Australian Aborigines," where this view was first set forth. (Stanford, 1893.) For cases of morality among savages see my Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, pp. 199-201.