only. In practice we can never succeed
in doing anything of the kind. A machine such as a watch we can take
to bits and then put together again. Even a chemical compound such
as water we can resolve into oxygen and hydrogen and then reproduce
out of its elements. But to dissect a living thing is to kill it once
and for all. Life, as was said in the first chapter, is something unique,
with the unique property of being able to evolve. As life evolves,
that is to say changes, by being handed on from certain forms to certain
other forms, a partial rigidity marks the process together with a
partial plasticity. There is a stiffening, so to speak, that keeps
the life-force up to a point true to its old direction; though, short
of that limit, it is free to take a new line of its own. Race, then,
stands for the stiffening in the evolutionary process. Just up to what
point it goes in any given case we probably can never quite tell. Yet,
if we could think our way anywhere near to that point in regard to
man, I doubt not that we should eventually succeed in forging a fresh
instrument for controlling the destinies of our species, an instrument
perhaps more powerful than education itself--I mean, eugenics, the
art of improving the human breed.

To see what race means when considered apart, let us first of all take
your individual self, and ask how you would proceed to separate your
inherited nature from the nature which you have acquired in the course
of living your life. It is not easy. Suppose, however, that you had
a twin brother born, if indeed that were possible, as like you as one
pea is like another. An accident in childhood, however, has caused
him to lose a leg. So he becomes a clerk, living a sedentary life in
an office. You, on the other hand, with your two lusty legs to help
you, become a postman, always on the run. Well, the two of you are
now very different men in looks and habits. He is pale and you are
brown. You play football and he sits at home reading. Nevertheless,
any friend who knows you both intimately will discover fifty little
things that bespeak in you the same underlying nature and bent. You
are both, for instance, slightly colour-blind, and both inclined to
fly into violent passions on occasion. That is your common inheritance
peeping out--if, at least, your friend has really managed to make
allowance for your common bringing-up, which might mainly account for
the passionateness, though hardly for the col