182 EVOLUTION 



or even misunderstood it as all historic 

 aristocracies have done ? True, we have not 

 their history in the letter, yet we have much 

 of it in the spirit; that of the folk-tales and 

 fairy tales, of which the most childlike and 

 sympathetic of the sciences is steadily re- 

 covering the values and the meanings ; and 

 these old child-tales are even returning to- 

 wards their social and vital applications 

 above all that of presenting the ideal of love 

 as the quest of life which our fathers called 

 romantic, which we now call eugenic and 

 think modern. Whereas out of all this re- 

 covery of the golden age and of the ancient 

 garden of fruitful labour, does there not 

 emerge the idea that its guardians, so much 

 wiser and happier than we knew, had thought 

 not only for the simpler creatures they cared 

 for and ruled and elevated, but for themselves 

 and for each other ? in short, that our 

 modern Eugenics, latest -born even among the 

 evolutionary sciences, may yet be among 

 the very oldest ; and that now once more, 

 at the opening of that new epoch of world- 

 consciousness and world-activity which is 

 involved no less thoroughly by the evolution 

 theory than was the passing industrial age by 

 the advance of mechanical science, the ancient 

 evolutionary past is being again reborn ? 



