the fact that it was a secret refuge left by law and public superstition
for the amateur of passionate torture. But there is no reason to suspect
Weismann of Sadism. Cutting off the tails of several generations of mice
is not voluptuous enough to tempt a scientific Nero. It was a mere piece
of one-eyedness; and it was Darwin who put out Weismann's humane and
sensible eye. He blinded many another eye and paralyzed many another
will also. Ever since he set up Circumstantial Selection as the creator
and ruler of the universe, the scientific world has been the very
citadel of stupidity and cruelty. Fearful as the tribal god of the
Hebrews was, nobody ever shuddered as they passed even his meanest and
narrowest Little Bethel or his proudest war-consecrating cathedral as we
shudder now when we pass a physiological laboratory. If we dreaded and
mistrusted the priest, we could at least keep him out of the house; but
what of the modern Darwinist surgeon whom we dread and mistrust ten
times more, but into whose hands we must all give ourselves from time
to time? Miserably as religion had been debased, it did at least still
proclaim that our relation to one another was that of a fellowship
in which we were all equal and members one of another before the
judgment-seat of our common father. Darwinism proclaimed that our true
relation is that of competitors and combatants in a struggle for mere
survival, and that every act of pity or loyalty to the old fellowship is
a vain and mischievous attempt to lessen the severity of the struggle
and preserve inferior varieties from the efforts of Nature to weed them
out. Even in Socialist Societies which existed solely to substitute
the law of fellowship for the law of competition, and the method of
providence and wisdom for the method of rushing violently down a steep
place into the sea, I found myself regarded as a blasphemer and an
ignorant sentimentalist because whenever the Neo-Darwinian doctrine was
preached there I made no attempt to conceal my intellectual contempt for
its blind coarseness and shallow logic, or my natural abhorrence of its