Читать книгу Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development - Galton Francis - Страница 14

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We must free our minds of a great deal of prejudice before we can rightly judge of the direction in which different races need to be improved. We must be on our guard against taking our own instincts of what is best and most seemly, as a criterion for the rest of mankind. The instincts and faculties of different men and races differ in a variety of ways almost as profoundly as those of animals in different cages of the Zoological Gardens; and however diverse and antagonistic they are, each may be good of its kind. It is obviously so in brutes; the monkey may have a horror at the sight of a snake, and a repugnance to its ways, but a snake is just as perfect an animal as a monkey. The living world does not consist of a repetition of similar elements, but of an endless variety of them, that have grown, body and soul, through selective influences into close adaptation to their contemporaries, and to the physical circumstances of the localities they inhabit. The moral and intellectual wealth of a nation largely consists in the multifarious variety of the gifts of the men who compose it, and it would be the very reverse of improvement to make all its members assimilate to a common type. However, in every race of domesticated animals, and especially in the rapidly-changing race of man, there are elements, some ancestral and others the result of degeneration, that are of little or no value, or are positively harmful. We may, of course, be mistaken about some few of these, and shall find in our fuller knowledge that they subserve the public good in some indirect manner; but, notwithstanding this possibility, we are justified in roundly asserting that the natural characteristics of every human race admit of large improvement in many directions easy to specify.

I do not, however, offer a list of these, but shall confine myself to directing attention to a very few hereditary characteristics of a marked kind, some of which are most desirable and others greatly the reverse; I shall also describe new methods of appraising and defining them. Later on in the book I shall endeavour to define the place and duty of man in the furtherance of the great scheme of evolution, and I shall show that he has already not only adapted circumstance to race, but also, in some degree and often unconsciously, race to circumstance; and that his unused powers in the latter direction are more considerable than might have been thought.

It is with the innate moral and intellectual faculties that the book is chiefly concerned, but they are so closely bound up with the physical ones that these must be considered as well. It is, moreover, convenient to take them the first, so I will begin with the features.