254 THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE 



character. The result so far has been ridicule and a 

 marked decrease in marriages. The absolute inability 

 to carry out the purpose of such a law does not seem to 

 have occurred to its promoters. If it were enforced 

 over a wide area, the youth would certainly dispense 

 with the ceremony of marriage rather than to debase 

 their ideals of love. And one can imagine the con- 

 sternation of physicians if they were forced to decide 

 when people were fit to marry. Very few of them 

 know anything about the laws of heredity, and those 

 that do know the laws of heredity also know that they 

 are so complex and so obscure that only a few extreme 

 cases can be trusted. As Huxley said, the points of 

 a good citizen are more difficult than those of a puppy 

 or a short-horn calf. 



A third class of eugenists consists mostly of the 

 hysterical element of the social workers who sob over 

 the sins of society and sob over the innate purity of 

 the harlot, who weep over the heartlessness of the law- 

 abiding and weep over the innate nobility of the crimi- 

 nal. So far as one can make out from their incoherent 

 utterances, they wish to put all the sins of the individual 

 on society, without comprehending that society is a col- 

 lection of individuals. Whatever good they may ac- 

 complish, no one in the least conversant with science 

 will concede that they are advancing an ethics in con- 

 formity with scientific methods; for if science makes 

 any one thing clear, it is that the actions of the indi- 



