ast it is likely to lead
into the latter at some time. Fortunately, eugenics is, paradoxical as
it may seem, able to advance on all these paths at once; for it proposes
no definite goal, it sets up no one standard to which it would make the
human race conform. Taking man as it finds him, it proposes to multiply
all the types that have been found by past experience or present reason
to be of most value to society. Not only would it multiply them in
numbers, but also in efficiency, in capacity to serve the race.

By so doing, it undoubtedly fulfills the requirements of that popular
philosophy which holds the aim of society to be the greatest happiness
for the greatest number, or more definitely the increase of the totality
of human happiness. To cause not to exist those who would be doomed from
birth to give only unhappiness to themselves and those about them; to
increase the number of those in whom useful physical and mental traits
are well developed; to bring about an increase in the number of
energetic altruists and a decrease in the number of the anti-social or
defective; surely such an undertaking will come nearer to increasing the
happiness of the greatest number, than will any temporary social
palliative, any ointment for incurable social wounds. To those who
accept that philosophy, made prominent by Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart
Mill, Herbert Spencer, and a host of other great thinkers, eugenics
rightly understood must seem a prime necessity of society.

But can any philosophy dispense with eugenics? Take those to whom the
popular philosophy of happiness seems a dangerous goal and to whom the
only object of evolution that one is at present justified in
recognizing is that of the perpetuation of the species and of the
progressive conquest of nature, the acquiring of an ascendancy over all
the earth. This is now as much a matter of self-preservation as it is of
progress: although man no longer fights for life with the cave bear and
saber-toothed tiger, the microbes which war with him are far more
dangerous enemies than the big mammals of the past. The continuation of
evolution, if it means conquest, is not a work for dilettantes and Lotos
Eaters; it is a task that demands unremitting hard work.

To this newer philosophy of creative work eugenics is none the less
essential. For eugenics wants in the world more physically sound men and
women _with greater ability in any valuable way_. Whatever the actual
goal of evolu