manages its
own affairs, or by any possibility could manage them. It manages but a
narrow fringe of its affairs, and that in the main by deputy. It is only
the thinnest surface layer of law and custom, belief and sentiment,
which can either be successfully subjected to destructive treatment, or
become the nucleus of any new growth--a fact which explains the apparent
paradox that so many of our most famous advances in political wisdom are
nothing more than the formal recognition of our political impotence.

As our expectations of limitless progress for the race cannot depend
upon the blind operation of the laws of heredity, so neither can they
depend upon the deliberate action of national governments. Such
examination as we can make of the changes which have taken place during
the relatively minute fraction of history with respect to which we have
fairly full information shows that they have been caused by a multitude
of variations, often extremely small, made in their surroundings by
individuals whose objects, though not necessarily selfish, have often
had no intentional reference to the advancement of the community at
large. But we have no scientific ground for suspecting that the stimulus
to these individual efforts must necessarily continue; we know of no law
by which, if they do continue, they must needs be co-ordinated for a
common purpose or pressed into the service of a common good. We cannot
estimate their remoter consequences; neither can we tell how they will
act and react upon one another, nor how they will in the long run affect
morality, religion, and other fundamental elements of human society. The
future of the race is thus encompassed with darkness; no faculty of
calculation that we possess, no instrument that we are likely to invent,
will enable us to map out its course, or penetrate the secret of its
destiny. It is easy, no doubt, to find in the clouds which obscure our
paths what shapes we please: to see in them the promise of some
millennial paradise, or the threat of endless and unmeaning travel
through waste and perilous places. But in such visions the wise man will
put but little confidence, content, in a sober and cautious spirit, with
a full consciousness of his feeble powers of foresight and the narrow
limits of his activity, to deal as they arise with the problems of his
own generation.

4. Eugenics as a Science of Progress[340]

Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences tha