Darwinism and human life : the South African lectures for 1909 / by J. Arthur Thomson.
- John Arthur Thomson
- Date:
- 1909
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Darwinism and human life : the South African lectures for 1909 / by J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.
237/270 page 219
![SELECTION: ORGANIC AND SOCIAL 219 enthusiast over bacterial selection says : The higher the infantile mortality which medicine so energetically combats, the surer is the next generation of being purged of all weak and sickly organisms. But he forgets that the infantile maladies also affect the intrinsically strong and capable, and often weaken them, one might say, quite gratuitously. (3) Many of the microbes which thin our ranks are very indiscriminate : they remove the wrong people. Prof. Berry Hay craft, in his Darwinism and Race Progress, points out that the hygienists, in warring against microbes, are eliminating the eliminators who have made our race what it is. This is a very doubtful thesis; but, even if it were true, it is open to us, as the author of course recognises, to put other modes of selection into operation. Can man not select better than bacteria ? Social Suegery.—A second suggestion, which goes a step further than the first, is that we should take more thought for the morrow by deliberately pruning our stock of its]^diseased buds, especially of those who, if they survive, will be miserable themselves and a cause of misery to others. Nietsche had the courage to say what many feel, that it would be a kindness to suppress a good many of us. There is no doubt about that, but would it be a permissible kindness ? Who is sufíicient for these things ? It is one thing to discourage in every feasible way—compatible with rational social sentiment—the breeding of weaklings by weaklings ; it is another thing to look a fellow creature in the eyes and say, You must die. Remove weaklings, forsooth ! read over the roll of](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18027921_0238.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
