Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political societyBagehot, Walter
Philosophy
Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society
Bagehot, Walter
Evolution; Nationalism; Political science
Any protective habit also struck out in such a time would have a far
greater effect than it could afterwards. A gregarious tribe, whose
leader was in some imitable respects adapted to the struggle for life,
and which copied its leader, would have an enormous advantage in the
struggle for life. It would be sure to win and live, for it would be
coherent and adapted, whereas, in comparison, competing tribes would be
incoherent and unadapted. And I suppose that in early times, when those
bodies did not already contain the records and the traces of endless
generations, any new habit would more easily fix its mark on the
heritable element, and would be transmitted more easily and more
certainly. In such an age, man being softer and more pliable, deeper
race-marks would be more easily inscribed and would be more likely to
continue legible.
But I have no pretence to speak on such matters; this paper, as I have
so often explained, deals with nation-making and not with race-making.
I assume a world of marked varieties of man, and only want to show how
less marked contrasts would probably and naturally arise in each. Given
large homogeneous populations, some Negro, some Mongolian, some Aryan,
I have tried to prove how small contrasting groups would certainly
spring up within each--some to last and some to perish. These are the
eddies in each race-stream which vary its surface, and are sure to last
till some new force changes the current. These minor varieties, too,
would be infinitely compounded, not only with those of the same race,
but with those of others. Since the beginning of man, stream has been a
thousand times poured into stream--quick into sluggish, dark into
pale--and eddies and waters have taken new shapes and new colours,
affected by what went before, but not resembling it. And then on the
fresh mass, the old forces of composition and elimination again begin
to act, and create over the new surface another world. 'Motley was the
wear' of the world when Herodotus first looked on it and described it
to us, and thus, as it seems to me, were its varying colours produced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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