egro races."
High hopes beat in this declaration. But Galton could not have
foreseen that the signing of a scrap of paper by one of the Modern
Europeans would let loose all the other Modern Europeans in a
pandemonium of horrors the lowest of the Negro races could not but
envy as a masterpiece of its kind. It seemed to be suspiciously easy
for him to accept an excuse to slide down the dizzy height he had
climbed from the African level.
The eugenists would put their trust in the encouraged breeding of the
best and the compulsory sterility of the rest. But what is the best,
and who are the best, and where will you find them when they are not
inextricably emulsified with the worst? It's a long, long way to the
day of a segregating out and in of Mendelian unit-characters. Besides,
this is a strange world of choices. Nobody is to be considered worthy
of parenthood until he has fallen in love properly. Nobody who would
permit an outsider's decision as to when he was properly in love would
be worth thirty cents as a parent. There is the ultimate dilemma
of the eugenist--the dilemma which destroys forever the dream of a
control of parenthood from the point of view of merely psychic values.
NEW PSYCHOLOGY
There are the claims and outcries and promises of the
psychologists--the specialists in the probing of the human soul and
human nature. In our time, the demand for a dynamic psychology of
process and becoming, psychology with an energy in it, has split them
into two schools--the emphasizers of instinct and the subconscious,
the McDougallians, and the pleaders for sex and the unconscious, the
Freudians. A synthesis between these two groups is latent, since their
differences are those of horizon merely. For the McDougallians look
upon the world with two eyes and see it whole and broad--the Freudians
see through their telescope a circular field and exclaim that they
behold the universe. It is true that they own a telescope.
But what has either to offer our quest for light on the future of
the species? Nothing very much. Thus, to turn to the disciples
of McDougall. In a recent volume entitled, "Human Nature and its
Remaking," Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard contends that
Man, all axioms about his nature to the contrary, is but a creature
of habit, and so the most plastic of living things, since habit is
self-controlled and self-determined. By the self-determination of the
habits of the race will the new freedom
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