by Guide » Tue Mar 12, 2019 12:53 am
Interesting. I'm sure he did know of a number of Evolutionary theories, but his theory did not largely concern race, but general "moral" development. Although, you might be right. There is biological content in the book.
I point out, however, on the other hand, Kant, some eighty years earlier, it must be said, in conceiving of distant planets, and their populations, wondered entirely of moral development. Never supposing anything but humans would be found in charge on other planets.
Madison says here, much earlier, but still in keeping with the idea: " I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe. "
The corruption consisted of men of sound faculties, able to live nobly and rightly, deliberately following bohemian and debased patterns of life. The issue between Ibsen and Strindberg about "The Stronger", a woman who chooses the traditional life of marriage rather than liberation, for instance, was more in question.
Of course, for the one who became a Zionist, the issue is latter, more clearly, over the status of Orthodoxy or a compromise religion, or, on the other hand, what he renounced after the Dreyfus Affair, assimilation and Cosmopolitanism.