5o6 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



to obtain the best specimens of that type. The doctrine that it takes 

 all sorts to make a world — a doctrine very hard for youth to learn, yet 

 unconsciously learnt by all who are capable of learning at all — must 

 be regarded as cardinal truth for the eugenist. All he asks for, all he 

 is wise in seeking, is good specimens rather than bad. Poets certainly 

 but not poetasters; jesters certainly, but not clever fools. 



Time and its treasure.— Taking the modern estimates of the 

 physicists, we are assured that the total period of past human existence 

 is very brief compared with what may reasonably be predicted. 

 Granted, then, practically unlimited time, what inherent limits are 

 there to the upward development of man as a moral and intellectual 

 being? Shall we answer this question by a study of the nature of 

 matter ? Plainly not. Shall we answer it by a study of the nature 

 of mind ? Surely not, for the study of the mind cannot inform us as 

 to what mind might be. One source of guidance alone we have, and 

 this is the amazing contrast which exists between the mind of man at 

 its highest, and mind in its humblest animal forms; or shall we say 

 even between the highest and lowest manifestations of mind within 

 the human species ? The measureless height of the ascent thus indi- 

 cated offers us no warrant for the conclusion that, as we stand on the 

 heights of our life, our "glimpse of a height that is higher" is only a 

 hallucination. On the contrary. 



There is no warrant whatever for supposing that the forces which 

 have brought us thus far are yet exhausted ; they have their origin in 

 the inexhaustible. Who, gazing on the earth of a hundred million 

 years ago, could have predicted life — could have recognized, in the 

 forces then at work and the matter in which they were displayed, the 

 promise and potency of all terrestrial hfe ? Who, contemplating life 

 at a much later stage, even later mammalian, could have seen in the 

 simian the prophecy of man ? Who, examining the earliest nervous 

 ganglia, could have foreseen the human cerebrum ? The fact that we 

 can imagine nothing higher than ourselves, that we make even our gods 

 in our own image, offers no warrant for supposing that nothing higher 

 will ever be. What ape could have predicted man, what reptile the 

 bird, what amoeba the bee ? ''There are many events in the womb of 

 time which will be delivered" and the fairest of her sons and daughters 

 are yet to be. 



But even grant, for the sake of the argument, that the intelligence 

 of a Newton, the musical faculty of a Bach, the moral nature of any 

 good mother anywhere, represent the utmost limits of which the 



