506 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 life? 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 
