e rise in the animal series, brain and adrenal glands march
side by side in developmental increase of size, and at the same time,
sexual activity and adrenal activity equally correspond.

Lovers in their play--when they have been liberated from the traditions
which bound them to the trivial or the gross conception of play in
love--are thus moving amongst the highest human activities, alike of the
body and of the soul. They are passing to each other the sacramental
chalice of that wine which imparts the deepest joy that men and women can
know. They are subtly weaving the invisible cords that bind husband and
wife together more truly and more firmly than the priest of any church.
And if in the end--as may or may not be--they attain the climax of free
and complete union, then their human play has become one with that divine
play of creation in which old poets fabled that, out of the dust of the
ground and in his own image, some God of Chaos once created Man.

CHAPTER VII

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE

I

The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the
most intimate of all relations. It is a relation which almost amounts to
identity. Yet it somehow seems so vague, so abstract, as scarcely to
concern us at all. It is only lately indeed that there has been formulated
even so much as a science to discuss this relationship, and the duties
which, when properly understood, it throws upon the individual. Even yet
the word "Eugenics," the name of this science, and this art, sometimes
arouses a smile. It seems to stand for a modern fad, which the superior
person, or even the ordinary plebeian democrat, may pass by on the other
side with his nose raised towards the sky. Modern the science and art of
Eugenics certainly seem, though the term is ancient, and the Greeks of
classic days, as well as their successors to-day, used the word Eugeneia
for nobility or good birth. It was chosen by Francis Galton, less than
fifty years ago, to express "the effort of Man to improve his own breed."
But the thing the term stands for is, in reality, also far from modern. It
is indeed ancient and may even be nearly as old as Man himself.
Consciously or unconsciously, sometimes under pretexts that have disguised
his motives even from himself, Man has always been attempting to improve
his own quality or at least to maintain it. When he slackens that effort,
when he allows his attention to be too exclusively drawn to o