THE PROMISE OF RACE CULTURE 509 
societies wherein it flourishes. The religion of the future, it was 
sought to argue, will be that which “best serves Nature’s unswerving 
desire—fullness of life.” The Founder of the Christian religion said, 
“Tam come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more 
abundantly.” It is higher and more abundant life that is the eugenic 
ideal. Progress I define as the emergence and increasing dominance 
of mind. Of progress, thus conceived, man is the highest fruit hitherto. 
He is also its appointed agent and eugenics is his instrument. 
To this end he must use all the powers which have blossomed in 
him from the dust. He must claim Art: and indeed in Wagner’s 
great music-drama, at the moment when the prophetic Briinnhilde 
tells Sieglinde who has just lost her mate that she, the expectant 
mother, may look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the 
world to come in the child Siegfried; and when the heroic theme is 
pronounced for the first time and followed by that which signifies 
redemption by love; then, I think, the eugenist may thrill not merely 
to the music, nor the humanity of the story, but to the spiritual and 
scientific truth which it symbolizes. 
If the struggle towards individual perfection be religious, so, 
assuredly, is the struggle, less egoistic indeed, towards racial perfection. 
If the historic meaning and purport of religion are as I conceive them, 
and if its future evolution may thence be inferred, there can be no 
doubt in the prophecy that in ages to come those high aspirations and 
spiritual visions which astronomy has dishoused from amongst the 
stars, and which, at their best, were ever selfish, will find a place on this 
human earth of ours. If we have transferred our hopes from heaven 
to earth and from ourselves to our children, they are not less religious. 
And they that shall be of us shall build up the old waste places; for we 
shall raise up the foundations of many generations. 
“We feel the high tradition of the world 
And leave our spirits on our children’s breasts,” 
