THE LAWS OF DESCENT 113 



errors, for their abilities becoming employed in directions 

 opposite to the fitness of their breeding and hereditary 

 talents, they cannot think correctly on the particular subjects 

 that their present occupation may demand, yet so great are the 

 gifts of cleverness and knowledge of which they are possessed, 

 that they are able to lead others on in false directions to their 

 own destruction. And wiser heads with less genius are 

 unable to convince them of their folly, till it is too late, because 

 they lack the experiences of hereditary knowledge of departed 

 progenitors, and because their hereditary antipathies prevent 

 them from being able to impress their hearers. But in the 

 future, as mankind evolves the powers that the evolution of 

 his soul of wisdom will bestow, we may hope that it will enable 

 him to understand and direct his actions by the advice of those 

 who have had experience that his ancestors may have been 

 deficient in. And in the future it will be found necessary to 

 cure ignorance and crime, less by teaching than by paying 

 more attention to scientific breeding of the human race, and to 

 turn our attention not to educating the foolish so much as to 

 breeding from the wise, and so prevent rearing a nation of 

 clever fools, but rather to breeding up a race of wise, indus- 

 trious, sober, economical and useful men, who will give a good 

 result for the time, labour and knowledge expended on their 

 education ; and I am convinced it is only by restricting and 

 preventing the breeding of the vicious, extravagant, foolish 

 and intemperate and greedy that we will ever attain the pre- 

 vention of crime. We must turn our jails into workhouses 

 for the benefit of the weak, poor and unfortunate, and make 

 them houses of detention where the criminals will be prevented 

 from breeding and perpetuating crime and folly, for crime is 

 only another name for folly. We must elaborate some scheme 

 for increasing the breeding of the fittest, that is to say, of the 

 most successful, and of decreasing the breeding of the unfit, 

 that is to say the failures and unemployables. 



I must now revert to what appears to me to be the true form 

 of immortality of the soul, for it appears to me that immor- 

 tality as is generally conceived in the idea of an individual 

 life of an individual soul, is not in accordance with the plan of 

 creation as divulged by the knowledge of evolution, and that 

 the true conception of immortality must be sought by a more 

 perfect knowledge of the evolution of plants, animals, and 



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