544 EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



societies wherein it flourishes. The religion of the future, it was 

 sought to argue, will be that which "best serves Nature's unswerving 

 desire — fullness of life." The Founder of the Christian religion said, 

 " I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more 

 abundantly." It is higher and more abundant life that is the eugenic 

 ideal. Progress I define as the emergence and increasing dominance 

 of mind. Of progress, thus conceived, man is the highest fruit hitherto. 

 He is also its appointed agent and eugenics is his instrument. 



To this end he must use all the powers which have blossomed in 

 him from the dust. He must claim Art: and indeed in Wagner's 

 great music-drama, at the moment when the prophetic Brunnhilde 

 tells Sieglinde who has just lost her mate that she, the expectant 

 mother, may look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the 

 world to come in the child Siegfried; and when the heroic theme is 

 pronounced for the first time and followed by that which signifies 

 redemption by love; then, I think, the eugenist may thrill not merely 

 to the music, nor the humanity of the story, but to the spiritual and 

 scientific truth which it symbolizes. 



If the struggle towards individual perfection be religious, so, 

 assuredly, is the struggle, less egoistic indeed, towards racial perfection. 

 If the historic meaning and purport of religion are as I conceive them, 

 and if its future evolution may thence be inferred, there can be no 

 doubt in the prophecy that in ages to come those high aspirations and 

 spiritual visions which astronomy has dishoused from amongst the 

 stars, and which, at their best, were ever selfish, will find a place on this 

 human earth of ours. If we have transferred our hopes from heaven 

 to earth and from ourselves to our children, they are not less religious. 

 And they that shall be of us shall build up the old waste places; for we 

 shall raise up the foundations of many generations. 



"We feel the high tradition of the world 

 And leave our spirits on our children's breasts." 



