Heredity, Variation and Genius 93 



When, if ever, the lust of life grows weak in the 

 race, as it notably is in the suicidal family, it will 

 not mightily concern itself about its ending. And 

 it is not impossible that some day there may be a 

 sad satiety of life. 



In one form or another under all sorts of 

 religious symbols, emblems, rites, forms and 

 ceremonies, equally revered while they thrive in 

 their season and equally despised when their 

 season is over, the underlying creed and strain of 

 progress are absorption of the individual into the 

 kind and the growth thereof by such sustenance. 

 The progressive carnifications of the animal world 

 are raised to the progressive social organizations 

 of the human world. By virtue of that principle 

 of progress, implicit or explicit, the species 

 expects its continuance and progress, counting 

 that religion the best which has the highest 

 social aspiration. In the lower animals the 

 welfare of the species is accomplished blindly by 

 the destruction of the unfit and the survival of the 

 fit ; in the human species self-denial and self- 

 renunciation, even large self-sacrifice, conscious 

 or unconscious, voluntary or enforced, by subor- 

 dination of self-regarding impulses to the common 

 weal of the social body, is the necessary condition 

 and ordained lesson of the building of a complex 

 organism ; the good of the predominant species 

 on earth, at what cost soever of pain and death to 

 inferior species, the selfish aim of individual un- 

 selfishness : such the social root of the evolved 

 moral law. 



