us ask ourselves whether
these leaders of thought who can claim long lineal descent from learned
ancestors show any mental capacity over and above that which is
displayed by those commoners who are also in the foremost ranks of
thought and science, but who cannot lay claim to such continuous
ancestral training.

If we admit the existence of two such separate classes to-day then the
answer must surely be that there is no mental difference discernible
between them. But I think we may safely conclude that there has been
very little of the kind of descent here presumed. It would be well-nigh
impossible to find people who could prove an unbroken lineage of
educated forbears going back more than four hundred years. During the
middle ages the monks of the Church were the chief and almost sole
depositories of education and learning, and as they were bound by their
vows to life-long celibacy there could be no transmission from them to
posterity of any of that increased capacity of brain which we are
supposing as having been acquired by each individual through his own
mental exertion. We know, of course, that there were frequent lapses
from the unnatural restraint imposed on these men so that some of them
may have propagated their kind, but such illegitimate offspring was not
likely to remain within the circle of learning and therefore could not
perpetuate the line. We of to-day know full well that the son of the
common labourer whose forefathers had no education can, with equality
of opportunity, achieve as much and travel as far in any field of mental
activity as can the scion of the oldest of our most favoured families.

There does not seem to have been any augmentation of human brain power
since written records of events were begun. Indeed it would seem rather
as if there had been in many places a decrease in intellectual capacity,
as when we compare the fellahin of modern Egypt with their great
ancestors whom they resemble so closely in physical appearance that
there can be little doubt about the purity of their descent. The same
may be said about the modern descendants of the people who created "the
glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." And when we
consider the period of the Renaissance we cannot say that civilised man
of to-day is superior to those people who after centuries of stagnation
and general illiteracy were yet able to seize and develop the
long-forgotten wisdom and philosophy of antiquity.

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