THE ARBITER OF ETHICS 249 



ample. So necessary was it to have an example of per- 

 fection which should not be subject to the waywardness 

 of human passions, that without exception all religions 

 assign divine attributes to their founders. And in 

 order to maintain the integrity and the unanimity of 

 belief in even a sect, the rest of society, with its con- 

 flicting purposes, has always been explicitly banished 

 from communion with the faithful. 



The case of eugenics is quite different. To be a sci- 

 ence it must deal with the race and not with indi- 

 viduals; instead of a founder, to whom are ascribed 

 divine or at least superhuman powers and who makes 

 an appeal to sympathy, it must rely on a body of judges 

 who appeal to law and reason, and who have discarded 

 the powerful check of personal responsibility and per- 

 sonal reward. Instead of choosing individuals from 

 society to form a more or less cohesive sect, the eu- 

 genists must constrain all individuals to forsake their 

 personal desires and attempt to bind these hetero- 

 geneous units into a homogeneous race. And who are 

 intellectually wise enough to be the arbiters of fate? 

 The clinging of man to the idea of corporal manifesta- 

 tions of divinity is a confession of the impotence of 

 man to grasp the problem of humanity. Huxley stated 

 this difficulty unanswerably long before eugenics came 

 to life. He, the evolutionist and biologist, warns us: 

 " I doubt whether even the keenest judge of character, 

 if he had before him a hundred boys and girls under 



