s
of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest
races. What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do
providently, quickly, and kindly. I see no impossibility in Eugenics
becoming a religious dogma among mankind, but its details must first be
worked out sedulously in the study. The first and main point is to
secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and
most important study. Then let its principles work into the heart of
the nation, who will gradually give practical effect to them in ways
that we may not wholly foresee.

C. PROGRESS AND HUMAN NATURE

1. The Nature of Man[341]

Man is certainly an animal that, when he lives at all, lives for ideals.
Something must be found to occupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and
pain into love and hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between
comfort and discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow.
Now that the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the
most part is so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast
impersonal business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of
honor. It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid
illusion--illusion, I mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a
mystical essence, for of course nationality is a fact. It is natural for
a man to like to live at home, and to live long elsewhere without a
sense of exile is not good for his moral integrity. It is right to feel
a greater kinship and affection for what lies nearest to one's self. But
this necessary fact and even duty of nationality is accidental; like age
or sex it is a physical fatality which can be made the basis of specific
and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or a flag to flaunt
or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities. Yet of this
distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol, perhaps because it
is the only distinction they feel they have left.

Everywhere in the nineteenth century we find a double preoccupation with
the past and with the future, a longing to know what all experience
might have been hitherto, and on the other hand to hasten to some wholly
different experience, to be contrived immediately with a beating heart
and with flying banners. The imagination of the age was intent on
history; its conscience was intent on reform.

2. Progress and the Mores[342]

What now are some of the leading features in the mor