BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1333 



policy; though all as yet in the rough. Still, in these days govern- 

 ments are becoming less unwilling to adopt measures suggested by 

 science; so it behoves the eugenists to be getting these clear and 

 ready. 



Such movement needs heralding, and this by literature; for im- 

 passioned writers often pioneer and influence the opening future 

 by their forecasts of it. Thus a generation ago and more, when a 

 too simply progressive notion of evolution was more general than 

 now, but degeneration and pathology, with heredity also, were 

 being also eagerly discussed, Zola's novels advanced in range and 

 grasp, and especially as regards heredity, witness the Rougon- 

 Macquart Series, culminating in Dr. Pascal. Similarly nowadays we 

 have Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga] and other authors are on kindred 

 lines. Hence too Mr. Wiggam's public appeal for eugenics above 

 cited culminates in one to our leading writers to help — and coming 

 ones will surely more and more do this. For not only in extreme 

 cases of bad and good heredity, like those above chosen, but in the 

 masses of material which eugenists can now offer, and in the fresh 

 observation ever open around us, there is ample scope for a fresh 

 Comedie Humaine, even more vital for our day than was Balzac's 

 for his time. Such a new writer would be read more widely than 

 even his predecessors, and with inspiration to rivals and successors ; 

 with these not only freshly re-interpreting the large-scale history 

 of the past, and the movement of the present, but creating for 

 every city and region a new "literature of locality", and that in- 

 creasingly suggestive for other regions as well. In a public thus 

 aroused and interested, what promise for eugenics, with its better 

 re-weaving of the web of social life ! 



NORMAL AND SUPER-NORMAL TYPES: "GENIUS".— It is 



an old saying of Emerson — towards whose philosophic and poetic 

 insight of evolution the thought of science is only now ripening, that 

 "all the facts of the animal economy — sex, nutriment, gestation, 

 birth, growth — are symbols of the passage of the world into the 

 soul of man, to suffer there a change and reappear a new and higher 

 fact". This, indeed, outlines what in previous pages we have been 

 striving to express in part. As psychobiologists we have to search 

 out more fully the conditions of such evolutionary progress, and 

 with experimental endeavours, as far as may be, to initiate fuller 

 realisations of them. For as these conditions are discerned, we see 

 that what have appeared but rare and exceptional manifestations 

 of humanity — whether as marvels of organic perfection and beauty, 

 or of "gift" or "genius" — are to be understood as flowerings of life, 

 and thus essentially normal. It is not their occurrence, but their 

 rarity which has to be explained. And this not exclusively, as with 

 our unsuccessfully flowering plants, in terms of inferior nature and 



