"You ought to mean," he said patiently, "a type which most successfully
sketches the civilization of the future, a type best fitted to dominate
and survive. Now you have only to glance at history to see that
intellectual supremacy is no guarantee whatever of such a type."
"Oh, Mr. Queed, I don't know about that."
"Then I will convince you," said he. "Look at the French--the most
brilliant nation intellectually among all the European peoples. Where
are they in the race to-day? The evolutionist sees in them familiar
symptoms of a retrogression which rarely ends but in one way. Look at
the Greeks. Every schoolboy knows that the Greeks were vastly the
intellectual superiors of any dominant people of to-day. An
anthropologist of standing assures us that the intellectual interval
separating the Greek of the Periclean age from the modern Anglo-Saxon is
as great as the interval between the Anglo-Saxon and the African savage.
Point to a man alive to-day who is the intellectual peer of Aristotle,
Plato, or Socrates. Yet where are the Greeks? What did their exalted
intellectual equipment do to save them in the desperate struggle for the
survival of the fittest? The Greeks of to-day are selling fruit at
corner stands; Plato's descendants shine the world's shoes.
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