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-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TANTALUS ***

-

-

-

-

-

-TANTALUS

-

-OR

-

-THE FUTURE OF MAN

-

-

-

-

-  TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

-  SERIES

-

-

-  DAEDALUS, or Science and the Future

-      _By J. B. S. Haldane_

-

-  ICARUS, or The Future of Science

-      _By Bertrand Russell, F. R. S._

-

-  THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST

-      _By F. G. Crookshank, M.D._

-

-  WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES

-      _By Prof. A. M. Low_

-

-  NARCISSUS, or The Anatomy of Clothes

-      _By Gerald Heard_

-

-  TANTALUS, or The Future of Man

-      _By F. C. S. Schiller_

-

-

-        IN PREPARATION

-

-  THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS

-      _By Professor Patten_

-

-  WOMAN AND THE FUTURE

-      _By Anthony M. Ludovici_

-

-

-  E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

-

-

-

-

-  TANTALUS

-  OR

-  The Future of Man

-

-  BY

-  F. C. S. SCHILLER

-

-  _M.A., D.Sc.; Fellow and Tutor of

-  Corpus Christi College, Oxford_

-

-  [Illustration]

-

-  _Man never is, but always to be, blest_

-

-  NEW YORK

-  E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

-  681 FIFTH AVENUE

-

-

-

-

-  Copyright 1924

-  By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

-

-  _All Rights Reserved_

-

-  _First Printing, November, 1924

-  Second Printing, March, 1925_

-

-  Printed in the United States of America

-

-

-

-

-PREFACE

-

-

-I rather anticipate that superficial critics who do not like the

-argument of this essay will accuse it of pessimism, a charge which

-perhaps means little more than that they do not like it. Nevertheless,

-it may be worth while to point out, (1) that pessimism is not a

-logical objection to a contention of which the truth cannot otherwise

-be questioned, and (2) that though the argument of _Tantalus_ may be

-said generally to corroborate that of _Daedalus_ and _Icarus_, yet its

-conclusion is much less pessimistic than theirs, because (3) it makes

-it very plain that the evils which threaten the future of mankind are

-in no case unavoidable. If it is called ‘pessimism’ to point out the

-methods by which men may escape destruction, because men do not care

-to adopt them, I suppose it must be ‘optimism’ to rush violently and

-open-eyed down a precipice, and to expect to be saved by a miracle.

-Certainly such would appear to be the belief upon which human affairs

-are at present conducted.

-

-                                                              F.C.S.S.

-

-

-

-

-TANTALUS

-

-

-

-

-TANTALUS

-

-

-

-

-PROLOGUE: THE ORACLE OF THE DEAD

-

-

-When I read in Mr Haldane’s _Daedalus_ the wonderful things that

-Science was going to do for us, and in Mr Russell’s _Icarus_ how easily

-both we and it might come to grief in consequence, it at once became

-plain to me that of all the heroes of antiquity Tantalus would be the

-one best fitted to prognosticate the probable future of Man. For, if

-we interpret the history of Daedalus as meaning the collapse of Minoan

-civilization under the strain imposed on its moral fibre by material

-progress, and the fate of Icarus as meaning man’s inability to use the

-powers of the air without crashing, one could gauge the probability

-that history would repeat itself still further, and that man would

-once more allow his vices to cheat him of the happiness that seemed so

-clearly within his reach.

-

-I determined, however, to confirm this intelligent forecast by

-consulting Tantalus himself. To consult the oracle of a dead hero, it

-was, I knew, only necessary to undergo the process of ‘incubation,’ a

-sort of camping out on his tomb, in the skin of a sacrificial beast;

-and fortunately the tomb of Tantalus had just been discovered in

-Phrygia by the archæologists of the British School at Athens.

-

-I set out, therefore, with great promptitude, and in due course,

-arrived at the ruins of the tomb of Tantalus. They did not much

-resemble a first-class hotel, and, of course, my idea of an

-‘incubation’ was well laughed at, but I managed to find a pretty level

-corner, more or less sheltered from the wind. Here I wrapped myself up

-in my excellent rug, having decided to dispense with the more correct

-method of ensconcing myself in the gory hide of a sacrificial ox. The

-night was fine, though cold, and fortunately there were no mosquitoes,

-nor any of the other insects one would inevitably have encountered in

-the dwellings of the living. But the ground was very, very, hard, and

-I tossed about for hours, regretting my classical education and the

-psychical researcher’s rashness in trying foolish experiments.

-

-At last I fell asleep, at least I suppose so. I also fell a great deal

-further. I seemed to go right through my rocky bed, and to fall down,

-down, down, interminably, through a sort of elastic space. When at last

-the not wholly unpleasant motion stopped, I found myself in a vast,

-grey, sandy plain, illuminated by a cold grey light as though of dawn.

-The only thing to catch the eye was a small round hummock, not very far

-from me. On it grew a mighty tree, with dark green pointed leaves and

-drooping branches, surrounded by a gleaming white fence or paling. I

-naturally walked towards it.

-

-As I got near, I noticed that the white paling, which completely

-enclosed the hummock, was composed of _bones_, or rather of every

-imaginable sort of spine, tooth and sting, garnished with the saws

-and swords of sawfish and swordfish, and all knit together into an

-impenetrable _cheval de frise_ that prevented approach to the foot of

-the tree. The soil all round this strange hedge had apparently been

-trodden into deep mud by some creature that had walked round and round

-the tree, and the water required for its manufacture was supplied by a

-small spring which rose within the enclosure and flowed out through its

-interstices.

-

-As I walked round the tree to the further side of the hummock, I came

-upon an extraordinary sight. I beheld a naked man trying to reach some

-of the fruit that dangled down from the outer branches of the tree but

-appeared to be just out of his reach, and so intent upon his design

-that he did not notice my approach. He seemed a tall man, and the upper

-part of his body was well formed. His features were good and regular,

-though somewhat hard, and not intellectual; his resolute jaw bespoke

-the man of action, accustomed to command and to be obeyed. So far, his

-appearance would have done credit to any modern captain of industry.

-But the lower half of his body appeared to be misshapen. His thighs

-were so curved that he could not walk upright, but had to stoop and

-lean forward as he slowly shambled along. Still more monstrous seemed

-the feet, with which he churned up the mud around the fence; they were

-enormous and hardly seemed human in their shape, though they were too

-deeply plunged in the mud to permit one to see what exactly was wrong

-with them.

-

-This strange being, whom the bold intuition of the dream-consciousness

-at once identified with Tantalus, was evidently trying to grasp the

-fruit that hung from the lower branches of the tree. For a while his

-efforts were vain, but then a gust of wind brought within his reach a

-large conical shining red fruit he had long coveted. It was one of the

-strange features of the tree that it was covered with fruit, and higher

-up also with flowers, of the most various sizes, shapes, and colours.

-He seized it triumphantly; but the effect was surprising. For he had

-hardly touched it when it exploded, and covered him from head to foot

-with its blood-red juice. He at once sank senseless to the ground. But,

-after a while, he slowly recovered, and recommenced his old game. This

-time, he attacked a large round yellowish fruit; but when he succeeded

-in seizing it, it too exploded, and poured out upon him volumes of a

-heavy yellow-green vapour. Again he collapsed, and this time his stupor

-lasted longer.

-

-By the time he began to stir again I had, I thought, grasped the

-situation, and determined to intervene. So I drew near, and addressed

-him: “Can I be mistaken in thinking that I see before me the far-famed

-hero, Tantalus, boon companion of the gods?” “And their victim.”

-“And what tree is this, I pray you, about which you busy yourself?”

-“The Tree of Knowledge.” “And the water, which you have trampled

-into mud, is what?” “The Elixir of Life.” “Then you seem to have all

-the materials for a happy life. Why don’t you eat of the fruits of

-the tree, and drink of the elixir?” “You have seen the results of my

-efforts.” “I cannot but think you have been unfortunate in your choice

-of the fruits: there are many that look much better higher up.” “And

-how am I to get at them?” “Well, of course, you must break through

-all these _debris_ of former animal life, which bar your access to

-the trunk of the tree, and prevent you from drinking of the water of

-life; after that, you can climb up the tree, and pick the best of the

-fruits.” “And how am I to break through the barrier of bones?” “Even

-though you appear to have no instruments, you can surely find a stone?”

-“Where shall I find a stone in the Plain of Forgetfulness? And besides,

-how should I climb the tree with these ... feet?” And he lifted up

-one of his monstrous limbs. “Certainly you seem to be pretty badly

-earth-bound,” said I, “but I will try to find you some stones.”

-

-So off I set. I had not got far when a fierce blast struck me and

-peppered me with sand. I struggled stoutly against it, but was nearly

-choked. And then, suddenly, I awoke to find that day was dawning and

-that the wind had gone round to the north, and was blowing in my face.

-But I was well satisfied with my experiment. The interpretation of the

-response I had obtained from Tantalus was too plain to need the aid of

-a psycho-analyst.

-

-

-

-

-I

-

-

-Our best prophets are growing very anxious about our future. They

-are afraid we are getting to know too much, and are likely to use

-our knowledge to commit suicide, or rather, mutual murder, after the

-fashion of the Kilkenny cats.

-

-To these dismal forecasts it is reasonable to reply that there is

-nothing novel in the present situation. The human race has always known

-enough to wreck itself, and its abounding folly has always inspired

-its wise men with the gravest apprehension for its future. Yet,

-either by chance or providence, it has always known also how to avoid

-destruction. It has never known enough to make itself happy; nor does

-it know enough to do so now. Its future has always been precarious,

-because it has always been uncertain whether it would use its knowledge

-well or ill, to improve or to ruin itself. It has always had a choice

-between alternative policies, and it has so now.

-

-What sense then is there in making such a fuss about the present

-crisis? It is a particularly plain case of the perennial choice of

-Hercules. What is needed is just a little clear thinking and plain

-speaking to a society more than usually debauched by a long regime of

-flattery, propaganda, and subterfuge. Mankind _can_ make a fool of

-itself, as it always could; if it does, its blood will be on its own

-head. For it has knowledge enough to avoid the dangers that threaten

-it, if it will use its knowledge properly.

-

-

-

-

-II

-

-

-The first fact to be enunciated plainly, and faced, until it grows

-familiar, and its import is appreciated, is that, biologically

-speaking, Man has ceased to be a progressive species long ago. The

-evolutionary impetus which carried our ancestors from the level

-of the ape or even of the lemur, through such subhuman types as

-_Pithecanthropus_, and the Heidelberg and Neanderthal men, to ‘modern’

-man, seems to have spent itself by the middle of the palæolithic

-period, _i.e._ say, thirty thousand years ago. At any rate, the

-Cro-Magnon people of the Aurignacian age, who then appeared upon the

-scene, were in no wise inferior to any subsequent race of men, either

-in stature or in brain capacity. They average six feet three inches

-in height, with one-sixth more brains than the modern European. So

-far indeed as their physical remains can indicate, they seem to have

-been very definitely the finest race of human beings that has ever

-existed. If we have improved on them, it has probably been only in such

-minor matters as resistance to the microbes of the many diseases which

-flourish among dense populations under slum conditions. Against that

-probability have to be set such certainties as that our toes and many

-of our muscles are being atrophied and that we are getting more liable

-to caries and baldness.

-

-This remarkable fact of the arrest of his biological development is

-certainly the greatest mystery in the history of Man. It at once

-raises two further questions: In the first place, how did it happen,

-and what caused it? And, secondly, what has enabled man, nevertheless,

-to progress in other respects, in knowledge, in power, and in culture?

-

-To answer the first question we cannot do better than argue back from

-what is now the most salient feature about man’s biological position,

-namely that his survival is determined far more by his relations to

-the social group to which he belongs than by personal efficiency:

-hence he can draw on the collective resources of his tribe, and, to a

-growing extent, gets emancipated from the control of natural selection.

-Thus social selection and the survival of societies profoundly modify

-(and often defeat), the working of natural selection. The advantages

-are obvious; it is no longer essential for a member of a society that

-collectively controls the conditions of existence to develop any high

-degree of personal capacity, in order to survive. A single wise and

-provident minister, like Joseph, is enough to keep alive millions of

-Pharaoh’s subjects through the lean years of famine. But the inferior

-and incompetent survive with the rest.

-

-Now, if we suppose that by mid-palæolithic times man had established

-his ascendency over nature and perfected his social organization

-sufficiently to render these services to his fellows, we have suggested

-a possible cause of the cessation of biological progress. For social

-influences are as likely as not to be ‘contra-selective,’ that is, to

-tend to preserve by preference the stocks which are less viable from

-a merely biological point of view. They are markedly so at present,

-and it would be asking too much to expect the tribal chiefs of early

-men to have been wise and provident enough to see to it that their

-social institutions were eugenical in their effects. We cannot even now

-find such a pitch of wisdom and providence in the controllers of our

-destinies.

-

-

-

-

-III

-

-

-The answer to the second question is much easier. The human race has

-continued to progress in its culture, in its knowledge, in its power

-over nature, because it has devised institutions which have created

-for it a continuous social memory that defies death. Now, as ever, the

-wisest and the best must die, while their place is taken by babies

-born as ignorant and void of knowledge as in the beginning. Only there

-has been invented apparatus which relieves the civilized baby of his

-hereditary ignorance, and renders him potentially the heir to all the

-wisdom of the ages.

-

-In the first place, _Language_ not only extends enormously the

-possibilities of co-operation and common action, but also renders

-possible the consolidation of customs and their preservation by oral

-tradition. In the next place, _Writing_ enables a society to record

-all that it considers worth remembering. Upon these two inventions may

-be reared vast intricate structures, religious, political, social,

-and scientific, which knit together and dominate human societies from

-generation to generation, and create the conditions for an almost

-mechanical accumulation of knowledge.

-

-Man has thereby become an educable creature and fallen a victim to the

-arts of the examiner. Provided the mechanisms of education do not get

-out of gear, it is hard to set limits to the amounts of knowledge with

-which he can be crammed; but it is clear that they are far greater

-than he could ever have acquired in a lifetime for himself. And as

-education (of sorts) has now become world wide, it might seem that the

-future of knowledge was now assured, and no longer liable to setbacks

-such as those due to the famous burning of the library of Alexandria

-at the command of the Caliph Omar, or the extinction of the only Greek

-scientists who seriously concerned themselves with the applications of

-science to life, of Archimedes and his School, in the sack of Syracuse.

-At any rate, it seemed clear that progress in knowledge could continue

-indefinitely, even in an otherwise stationary or decadent society.

-

-Whoever argued thus would fail to make sufficient allowance for the

-perversity of human nature. Human institutions, like the human body,

-are ever tending to get clogged with the waste products of their

-own working. Hence, so far from performing the functions for which

-they were intended, they are constantly becoming the most formidable

-instruments for their frustration. Experience shows how easily Churches

-become the most effective deadeners of religious zeal, how often Law

-becomes the negation of justice, how deadly is the School to the inborn

-craving for knowledge which seemed to Aristotle so characteristic of

-man’s nature.

-

-Accordingly, no one familiar with the actual working of academic

-institutions is likely to fall into the error of pinning his faith to

-them. They are, of course, designed for the purpose of preserving and

-promoting the highest and most advanced knowledge hitherto attained:

-but do they anywhere fulfil this purpose? Its execution must of

-necessity be left to professors not exempt from human frailty, always

-selected by more or less defective methods, whose interests by no

-means coincide with those of their subjects. The interest of the

-subject is to become more widely understood and so more influential.

-The interest of the professor is to become more unassailable, and so

-more authoritative. He achieves this by becoming more technical. For

-the more technical he gets, the fewer can comprehend him; the fewer

-are competent to criticize him, the more of an oracle he becomes; if,

-therefore, he wishes for an easy life of undisturbed academic leisure,

-the more he will indulge his natural tendency to grow more technical as

-his knowledge grows, the more he will turn away from those aspects of

-his subject which have any direct practical or human interest. He will

-wrap himself in mysteries of technical jargon, and become as nearly

-as possible unintelligible. Truly, as William James once exclaimed to

-me, apropos of the policy of certain philosophers, “the natural enemy

-of any subject is the professor thereof!” It is clear that if these

-tendencies are allowed to prevail, every subject must in course of time

-become unteachable, and not worth learning.

-

-Thus educational systems become the chief enemies of education, and

-seats of learning the chief obstacles to the growth of knowledge, while

-in an otherwise stagnant or decadent society these tendencies sooner

-or later get the upper hand and utterly corrupt the social memory.

-The power of the professor is revealed not so much by the things he

-teaches, as by the things he fails or refuses to teach.

-

-History is full of examples. How many religions have not perished

-from ritual sclerosis, how many sciences have not been degraded into

-pseudo-sciences or games! Logic has been just examinable nonsense for

-over two thousand years. The present economic chaos in the world has

-been indirectly brought about by the policy adopted by the professors

-of economics forty or fifty years ago, to suit their own convenience.

-For they then decided that they must escape from the unwelcome

-attentions of the public by becoming more ‘scientific’; _i.e._ they

-ceased to express themselves in plain language and took to mathematical

-formulae and curves instead; with the result that the world promptly

-relapsed into its primitive depths of economic ignorance. So soon as

-the professors had retired from it, every economic heresy and delusion,

-which had been exposed and uprooted by Adam Smith, at once revived

-and flourished. In one generation economics disappeared completely

-from the public ken and the political world, and the makers of the

-Peace Treaties of 1919 were so incapable of understanding an economic

-argument that not even the lucid intelligence of Mr Keynes could

-dissuade them from enacting the preposterous conditions which rendered

-impossible the realization of their aims.[A] Nor was it so very long

-ago that, in order to save the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, it

-had to be recast, because it had degenerated into an intellectual

-jig-saw puzzle, wholly unrelated to the applications of mathematics

-to the other sciences. To avoid jealousies, I hasten to add that the

-University of Oxford, which has organized itself as an asylum for

-lost causes, skilfully cultivates, by means of its classical and

-historical studies, a backward-looking bias in its _alumni_. The true

-‘Greats’ man is meant to go down indelibly imbued with the conviction

-that in matters of morals and politics nothing of importance has been

-discovered or said since Plato and Aristotle, and that nothing else

-matters.

-

-Clearly then we cannot take for granted that in any society knowledge

-can progress without limits, nor can we count on our academic

-institutions to save us from stagnation and decay, even in matters of

-knowledge. All institutions are social mechanisms, and all mechanisms

-need a modicum of intelligent supervision, in the absence of which they

-become dangerous engines of destruction.

-

-

-

-

-IV

-

-

-It appears then that we can extract no guarantee of progress either

-from the nature of Man or from the nature of human institutions. There

-is no _law_ of progress, if by law be meant a superior power able to

-coerce the creatures that are said to ‘obey’ it. Neither can we extract

-from history any proof of the superiority of civilized man over his

-uncivilized ancestors. Such progress as has been attained has been

-achieved only by the active co-operation of the progressive organisms:

-every step has been fought for, and progress has ceased whenever

-effort ceased, or was switched off into different directions.

-

-Consequently, modern man has no right to ‘boast himself far better

-than his fathers’--in intrinsic quality. Intrinsically, _i.e._ apart

-from the effects of culture and social training, it is probable that

-he is slightly _inferior_ in capacity to his own ancestors, while

-very markedly inferior to the great races of antiquity (like the

-Greeks) in their hey-day. Nor is there any reason to suppose that his

-moral nature has changed materially. Modern man may be a little tamer

-and better-tempered, because he has been herded together much more

-closely than primitive man, and city life, even in slums, demands,

-and produces, a certain ‘urbanity.’ For many generations those who

-would not pack tight and could not stand the strain of constantly

-exhibiting ‘company manners’ and accommodating their action to those

-of their fellows, must have fled away into the wilds, where they could

-be independent, or have eliminated themselves in other ways, _e.g._ by

-committing murder. It is probable that the social history of Iceland,

-settled as it was by unbridled individualists who would not brook any

-form of organized government, might throw some light on this process of

-taming the individual.

-

-Nevertheless there is little doubt that, in the main, humanity is

-still Yahoo-manity. Alike in mentality and in _moral_, modern man is

-still substantially identical with his palæolithic ancestors. He is

-still the irrational, impulsive, emotional, foolish, destructive,

-cruel, credulous, creature he always was. Normally the Yahoo in him

-is kept under control by the constant pressure of a variety of social

-institutions; but let anything upset an established social order, and

-the Yahoo comes to the front at once. The history of the past fifty

-years abundantly proves that man is still capable of atrocities equal

-to any in his record. Not only have we lived through the greatest

-political and the deadliest natural convulsion, the Great War and the

-Tokio earthquake, but the Russian Revolution has outdone the French and

-Landru the legendary Bluebeard, while for mingled atrocity and baseness

-the murders of Rasputin and of Alexander of Serbia are unsurpassed in

-history. The painful truth is that civilization has not improved Man’s

-moral nature. His moral habits are still mainly matters of custom, and

-the effect of moral theories is nugatory everywhere. Thus civilization

-is not even skin deep; it does not go deeper than the clothes.

-

-

-

-

-V

-

-

-Clearly it is risky to expose the inelastic nature of so stubbornly

-conservative a creature to new conditions at a rapid rate. He may not

-be able to adapt himself quickly enough, and his old reactions, which

-did little or no harm before, may become extremely dangerous. Yet this

-is just what has happened. Science has exposed the palæolithic savage

-masquerading in modern garb to a series of physical and mental shocks

-which have endangered his equilibrium. It has also enormously extended

-his power and armed him with a variety of delicate and penetrating

-instruments which have often proved edge tools in his hands and which

-the utmost wisdom could hardly be trusted to use aright. Under these

-conditions the fighting instinct ceases to be an antiquated foible,

-like the hunting instinct, and becomes a deadly danger. No wonder the

-more prescient are dismayed at the prospect of the old savage passions

-running amok in the full panoply of civilization!

-

-

-

-

-VI

-

-

-Nor is this the final item in our tale of woe. A third and most

-sinister fact which has to be faced is that Civilization, as at present

-constituted, is very definitely a deteriorating agency, conducing to

-the degeneration of mankind. This effect of Civilization is nothing

-new, but has been operating, it would seem, from the beginning,

-though not probably as intensively as now: its discovery, however, is

-very recent. It is quite indirect, unintended, and fortuitous, but

-cumulative, and in the long run has probably been a chief cause in the

-decay of States and civilizations, as well as an important factor in

-the arrest of biological development which we have had to recognize.

-

-A simple and easily observable sociological fact is at the bottom

-of the mischief. The different classes in a society have different

-birth-rates and death-rates, and the differences between these yield

-their several net rates of increase or decrease. Now, whereas under

-the conditions of savage life class differences can hardly exist, or,

-at least cannot be accentuated, so that the whole tribe flourishes or

-perishes together, and among barbarians the upper classes have a very

-great advantage and the tribe recruits itself chiefly from the children

-of the chiefs, because the conditions of life are so severe that

-the lower classes are not able to rear many children; in civilized

-societies these conditions are reversed. It is found that though both

-birth-rates and death-rates grow as we descend the social scale, so

-does the net rate of increase. Indeed, the highest or ruling class

-nowhere appears to keep up its numbers without considerable recruitment

-from below. So society, as at present organized, is always dying off at

-the top, and proliferating at the bottom, of the social pyramid.

-

-The disastrous consequences of this sort of social organization may

-easily be apprehended, with a little reflection. (1) All societies,

-even those whose social structure is most rigid, have need of ability,

-discover it, and reward it by social promotion. But (2) as this

-promotion means passing into a class with a relatively inadequate

-rate of reproduction, the biological penalty attaching to social

-promotion is racial extinction. Thus (3) the ultimate reward of merit

-is sterilization, and society appears to be an organization devoted to

-the suicidal task of extirpating any ability it may chance to contain,

-by draining it away from any stratum in which it may occur, promoting

-it into the highest, and there destroying it. It is exactly as though a

-dairyman should set in motion apparatus for separating the cream from

-the milk, and then, as it rose, skim it off, and throw it away!

-

-At present it is calculated that the highest classes in the chief

-civilized societies only reproduce themselves to the extent of fifty

-per cent. of their number in each generation, so that the hereditary

-ability of half of them is lost in each generation. But even then the

-remainder is largely wasted. It is churned into froth and scum by

-social forces. For neither now nor at any time has social intelligence

-shown itself equal to devising a training for the youth of the highest

-classes that would provide them with adequate stimuli to develop their

-faculties, and to lead a strenuous life of social service. The children

-of the rich are tempted to live for ‘society’ in the narrower sense,

-which means frittering away one’s life on a round of vacuous amusement;

-and they rarely resist the temptation.

-

-Naturally it is difficult to trace the accumulation of ability in the

-upper social strata which is theoretically to be expected. On the other

-hand, in some subjects at any rate, the symptoms of a world-wide

-dearth of ability are becoming unmistakable. The Great War, though it

-made abundantly manifest the prevalence of incompetents in high places,

-did not reveal the existence either of a great general or of a great

-statesman anywhere.

-

-It is superfluous to insist either on the fatuity of a social

-organization such as this, or on the certainty of racial degeneration

-which it entails: but it may be well to draw attention to the

-_rapidity_ with which these degenerative processes are at present

-sapping the vitality and value of our civilized races. The failure to

-reproduce does not, as in former times, affect merely the aristocracy

-in the highest social strata; it has spread to the whole of the

-professional and middle classes, and to most classes of skilled

-labour. It is not too much to say that, with the exception of the

-miners, none of the desirable elements in the nation are doing their

-bit to keep up the population, and that its continued growth is mainly

-due to the unrestrained breeding of the casual labourers and the

-feeble-minded.

-

-In the rest of the population its increase is checked by birth-control

-and the postponement of marriage, neither of which affects the

-undesirables. They are too stupid, reckless, and ignorant to practise

-the former, and have nothing to gain by the latter. Also, to make it

-quite certain that they shall form a true ‘proletariate,’ the wisdom

-of our rulers ordains that a knowledge of birth-control shall be a

-(fatal) privilege reserved for the intelligent and well-to-do. They

-instruct the police to prevent it from penetrating to the poor and

-stupid--apparently from the mistaken idea that the State needs plenty

-of cheap labour and cheap cannon-fodder. So child-bearing remains

-compulsory for the wretched women of the poor, whereas elsewhere only

-those women produce children who desire them, and natural selection is

-thus allowed gradually to eliminate the temperament of the unwilling

-(and, therefore, probably less competent) mother.

-

-The dysgenic effects of this class-discrimination are further

-intensified by other tendencies: (1) The advance of medicine and

-hygiene has enormously diminished selective mortality in all classes,

-and improved the chances of weaklings to survive and leave descendants.

-(2) The advance of philanthropy preserves them, especially in the lower

-classes, where formerly the mortality was largely selective and a high

-death-rate both counteracted an excessive birth-rate and increased the

-value of the survivors. The emotional appeal of ‘baby-saving’ goes so

-directly to the heart of civilized man that his head never reflects

-whether the particular baby is worth saving, and whether a baby from a

-different breed and with a better pedigree would not be better worth

-having. (3) Modern obstetrics save the lives of thousands of women,

-whose physique is such that in former times they would inevitably

-have died in child-birth. The result is that child-birth is becoming

-more difficult. Also babies brought up on the bottle, which has an

-irresistible attraction for microbes of all sorts, are apt to be less

-healthy than those nourished in the more primitive manner.

-

-(4) Lastly, the bastardizing, which used formerly to provide for a

-considerable infusion of the blood of the upper classes into the lower,

-has now practically ceased. Since the merry days of King Charles

-II, very few noble families of royal descent have been added to the

-peerage.

-

-

-

-

-VII

-

-

-Our civilization, therefore, carries within it the seeds of its own

-decay and destruction, and it does not require high prophetic gifts

-to predict the future of a race which goes the way marked out for

-it by such perversely suicidal institutions. It cannot improve, but

-must degenerate, and the only question would seem to be whether the

-decadence of Man will leave him viable as a biological species. At

-present it looks very much as though his blind leaders would lead

-their blinder followers from catastrophe to catastrophe, through

-imperialist world-wars to class-wars and to race-wars: but even if, by

-some miraculous rally of human intelligence, these convulsions should

-be averted, the prospect will not really be improved. The violent

-destruction of the human race by war will only be more _dramatic_:

-it will not be more _fatal_ than its gradual decay as its arts and

-sciences slowly fossilize, or peter out, in an overwhelming flood of

-feeble-mindedness.

-

-

-

-

-VIII

-

-

-This is the one alternative. We shall get to it, if we go on as we

-are going: but it is not our doom. The alternative is to exercise the

-danger by an adequate reform of human nature and of human institutions.

-This again seems attainable in at least two ways.

-

-The first, and more paradoxical, of these would make a direct frontal

-attack on the palæolithic Yahoo, and try to bring about his moral

-reformation. The means for this purpose are ready to hand. Christian

-ethics have been in being, as a moral theory, for nearly two thousand

-years. If the Yahoo could be really christianized, he would at any

-rate cease to cut his own throat in cutting his neighbour’s. And it

-is astonishing how much scientific support is forthcoming for the

-paradoxes of Christian ethics. It is an historical fact that the meek

-have a knack of inheriting the earth after their lords and masters

-have killed each other off, and that passive resistance wears out the

-greatest violence, and conscientious objection defeats the craftiest

-opportunism, if only you can get enough of them. It is a biological

-fact that the rabbit survives better than the tiger; and the same would

-appear to be true of the human ‘rabbit’ and the Nietzschean ‘wild

-beast.’ Intrinsically, therefore, Christian ethics might be well worth

-trying.

-

-I wish I could believe it likely that this policy will be tried. But

-the palæolithic Yahoo has been dosed with Christian ethics for two

-thousand years, and they have never either impressed or improved

-him. Their paradoxes give him a moral shock, and he has not brains

-enough to grasp their rationality. He will exclaim rather with the

-gallant admiral in the House of Commons, when justly indignant at

-the unheard-of notion that a ‘moral gesture’ of a Labour Government

-might be the best policy, “Good God, sir, if we are to rely for our

-air security on the Sermon on the Mount, all I can say is, ‘_God help

-us!_’” Besides, the proposal to put Christian principles into practice

-would be bitterly opposed by all the Churches in Christendom.[B]

-

-It may be more prudent, therefore, to try a safer though slower

-way, that of the eugenical reform and reconstruction of our social

-organization. As to the possibilities in this direction, I incline to

-be much more hopeful than either Mr Haldane or Mr Russell. Mr Haldane

-despises eugenics, because he is looking for the more spectacular

-advent of the ‘ectogenetic baby,’ to be the Saviour of mankind. But he

-might not arrive, or be seriously delayed in transmission, or fail to

-come up to Mr Haldane’s expectations; and, meanwhile, we cannot afford

-to wait.

-

-Mr Russell distrusts eugenics, because he fears that any eugenical

-scheme put into practice will be ‘nobbled’ by our present ruling rings,

-and perverted into an instrument to consolidate their power. He thinks

-that dissent from dominant beliefs and institutions will be taken as

-proof of imbecility, and sterilized accordingly,[C] and that the result

-would merely be to spread over all the world the hopeless uniformity

-and commonplaceness of the ideals and practice of the American business

-man, as depicted by Mr Sinclair Lewis.

-

-This prognostication would be very plausible, if we supposed eugenics

-to be introduced into the social structure from above, privily, and in

-small doses, and by way of administrative order, as under the existing

-Acts to check the spread of feeble-mindedness.

-

-But this method would be impracticable. It would not generate anything

-like the social momentum necessary to carry through any radical

-reform. To make it effective, it would have to be backed by a powerful,

-enthusiastic, and intelligent public sentiment. This presupposes that

-the public has been biologically educated to appreciate the actual

-situation, and has been thoroughly wrought up about the fatuity of our

-social order, and understands what is wrong with it. If it understands

-that much, it can also be made to see that it is fantastic to expect

-to leap to the Ideal State by a social revolution. No one now knows

-what the institutions of an Ideal State would be like, nor how they

-would work. We only know that they will have to be evolved out of our

-present institutions, even as the Superman has to be evolved out of the

-primitive Yahoo. In either case, the process will be gradual, and its

-success will depend upon details, on taking one step after another at

-the right rate in the right direction, making a new adjustment here,

-overcoming an old difficulty there, removing obstacles, smoothing

-over the shell-holes and scars dating from Man’s lurid past, and, in

-general, feeling one’s way systematically and scientifically to better

-things. Such a mode of progression may seem unheroic, but it has the

-great advantage that it is unlikely to go irretrievably wrong. If we

-know from the outset that we are tentatively feeling our way, we shall

-always be on the look out for traps and possibilities of going astray,

-trying out the value of our policies by their results, and willing to

-retrace our steps when we have made a false one.

-

-The social temper, therefore, will become far more intelligent and

-reasonable than it has been hitherto. It will be slow to dogmatize,

-and will regard the _toleration_ of differences of opinion as among

-the cardinal principles of a sanely progressive social order. For

-as we can no longer assume, with Plato and the other Utopians, that

-_perfection_ may be postulated, provision has always to be made for

-the _improvement_ of the social order. It can never be accepted as

-absolutely good, but must always be regarded as capable, in principle,

-of being bettered. Even the best of established institutions are only

-good relatively to the alternatives to which they showed themselves

-superior: under changed conditions they may become inferior, and may

-fail us, or ruin us, if we do not make haste to transform them into

-something better fitted to the new conditions. Hence the social order

-must be _plastic_, and must never be allowed to grow rigid. There must

-always be room in it for experiments that have a reasonable prospect of

-turning out to be improvements. For progress will depend on the timely

-adoption of such novelties.

-

-But society has no means of commanding them at will. It has to wait

-till they occur to some one. As biological variations have to arise

-spontaneously before they can be selected, so valuable new ideas

-have to occur in a human mind before they can be tried and approved.

-Society cannot originate discoveries, it can only refrain from so

-organizing itself as to stamp them out when they occur. It is vitally

-necessary, therefore, that we should beware of suppressing variations,

-whether of thought or of bodily endowment, that may prove to be

-valuable.

-

-Also, of course, we shall have to realize that our whole procedure is

-_essentially experimental_, and all that this implies. We do not know,

-at the outset, what would be the best obtainable type, either of man or

-of society; true, but we mean to find out. Nor is it unreasonable to

-expect to do so as we go along. We start with a pretty shrewd suspicion

-that certain types, say the feeble-minded, the sickly, the insane, are

-undesirable, and that no good can come of coddling and cultivating

-them: we similarly are pretty sure that certain other types, say the

-intelligent, healthy, and energetic, are inherently superior to the

-former. We try, therefore, to improve and increase the better types.

-How precisely, and how most effectively we do not quite know, though we

-can make pretty good preliminary guesses. So we try. That will entail

-experimentation in a variety of directions, with ‘control experiments,’

-and a modicum of mistakes. But our mistakes will not be fatal, because

-if we advance tentatively and with intelligent apprehension, we shall

-realize them in time, and shall not feel bound to persist in any course

-that yields unsatisfactory results.

-

-It is really one of the great advantages of eugenics that it cannot

-proceed upon any cut-and-dried scheme, but will have to be guided by

-the results of experiment and the fruits of experience, each of which

-will be followed and discussed by an intensely interested public.

-For the difficulties of eugenics are all difficulties of detail,

-and intelligent attention to detail may overcome them all. Thus

-the dysgenical working of civilized society, which has come about

-unintentionally through the unfortunate convergence of a number of

-tendencies, may be altered similarly, by changing the incidence of

-social forces.

-

-

-

-

-IX

-

-

-If scientific eugenics can put a stop to the contra-selection

-incidental to civilization, Man will recover the plasticity and

-the progressiveness he once possessed, and will be able to evolve

-further--in whatever direction seems to him best. We need not take

-alarm at this possibility, for with his superior knowledge he may

-surely be trusted to make a better job of his evolution than the

-_Lemur_ and the _Pithecanthropus_, who were our progenitors and managed

-to evolve into modern man.

-

-But the process will necessarily be a slow one, even though a

-comprehensive scheme of eugenics will be providing simultaneously _two_

-sources of improvement, by the elimination of defectives at the bottom

-of the social scale, and by the increase of ability at the top. As,

-moreover, time presses, and sheer destruction may overtake us before

-eugenics have made much difference, it would be highly desirable if

-some means could be found to accelerate the change of heart required.

-For this purpose, I am much less inclined to put my trust in the

-advance of pharmacology than Mr Haldane and Mr Russell.[D] Hitherto

-new drugs have only meant new vices, sometimes (like cocaine) of so

-fascinating a character as to distract the whole police force from

-their proper function of repressing crime. So it seems legitimate to

-be very sceptical about moral transformation scenes to be wrought by

-pills and injections.

-

-On the other hand there does seem to be a science from the possible

-progress of which something of a sensational kind might not

-unreasonably be expected. It is, moreover, the science most directly

-concerned with affairs of this sort. Psychology, the science of human

-mentality, is, by common consent, in a deplorably backward state. It

-has remained a ground for metaphysical excursions and a playground for

-the arbitrary pedantries of classificatory systematists. Its efforts

-to become scientific have only led it to ape assumptions and to borrow

-notions found to be appropriate in sciences with widely different

-problems and objects. The results, as the psychologists themselves

-confess, are meagre and disappointing; which, of course, only proves

-that the borrowed notions are inappropriate and incapable of making

-Psychology into an effective science. But if psychologists should

-take it into their heads to settle down to business, to recognize

-the primary obligation of every science to develop methods and

-conceptions capable of working upon its subject-matter, and so tried

-to authenticate their ‘truth’ after the ordinary fashion of the other

-sciences, namely by the pragmatic test of successful working, some

-surprising effects might be elicited even from the actual human mind.

-

-For there is reason to suppose that its present organization is very

-far from being the best of which it is capable. It has come about in a

-very haphazard manner, and we are not at present making anything like

-an adequate use of all our powers. Hence by changing the gearing and

-re-arranging the traditional coupling, so to speak, of our faculties,

-improvements might conceivably be wrought which would seem to us to

-border on the miraculous. Thus a pragmatically efficient Psychology

-might actually invert the miracle of Circe, and really transform the

-Yahoo into a man.

-

-

-

-

-X

-

-

-I have endeavoured in this very summary sketch to show that the doom of

-Tantalus is by no means unconditional, and that he can save himself if

-he chooses, and that by no superhuman effort, but merely by recognizing

-facts that are right before his nose and well within his comprehension,

-and by a little clear thinking upon their import. But I would not

-presume to predict that he _will_ save himself: history affords no

-unambiguous guide. It seems to show that something worse and something

-better than what actually happens is always conceivable, and that

-neither our hopes nor our fears are ever fully realized. If so, poor

-Tantalus, hoping against hope, fearing against reason, may muddle along

-for a good while yet, without repeating either his ancient error of

-imagining that he could sup with the gods, or his modern folly of using

-his reason, as Goethe’s Mephistopheles declared, only to become more

-bestial than any beast!

-

-

-

-

-FOOTNOTES:

-

-

-[A] The most absurd perhaps was the clause, appearing in all the Peace

-Treaties, which made ‘reparations’ a first charge on all the assets of

-the defeated countries. This, of course, completely destroyed their

-credit, and incapacitated them from raising a loan, forcing them to

-have recourse to progressive inflation, and so into bankruptcy.

-

-[B] This does _not_ mean, of course, that there are no Christians

-in the Churches, but only that they are not in control of these

-institutions.

-

-[C] _Icarus_, p. 49.

-

-[D] cf. _Daedalus_, p. 34; _Icarus_, p. 54.

-

-

-

-

-TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

-

-

-  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

-

-  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

-

-

-

-

+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TANTALUS ***
+
+
+
+
+
+TANTALUS
+
+OR
+
+THE FUTURE OF MAN
+
+
+
+
+  TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
+  SERIES
+
+
+  DAEDALUS, or Science and the Future
+      _By J. B. S. Haldane_
+
+  ICARUS, or The Future of Science
+      _By Bertrand Russell, F. R. S._
+
+  THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST
+      _By F. G. Crookshank, M.D._
+
+  WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES
+      _By Prof. A. M. Low_
+
+  NARCISSUS, or The Anatomy of Clothes
+      _By Gerald Heard_
+
+  TANTALUS, or The Future of Man
+      _By F. C. S. Schiller_
+
+
+        IN PREPARATION
+
+  THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS
+      _By Professor Patten_
+
+  WOMAN AND THE FUTURE
+      _By Anthony M. Ludovici_
+
+
+  E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+  TANTALUS
+  OR
+  The Future of Man
+
+  BY
+  F. C. S. SCHILLER
+
+  _M.A., D.Sc.; Fellow and Tutor of
+  Corpus Christi College, Oxford_
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  _Man never is, but always to be, blest_
+
+  NEW YORK
+  E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
+  681 FIFTH AVENUE
+
+
+
+
+  Copyright 1924
+  By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
+
+  _All Rights Reserved_
+
+  _First Printing, November, 1924
+  Second Printing, March, 1925_
+
+  Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+I rather anticipate that superficial critics who do not like the
+argument of this essay will accuse it of pessimism, a charge which
+perhaps means little more than that they do not like it. Nevertheless,
+it may be worth while to point out, (1) that pessimism is not a
+logical objection to a contention of which the truth cannot otherwise
+be questioned, and (2) that though the argument of _Tantalus_ may be
+said generally to corroborate that of _Daedalus_ and _Icarus_, yet its
+conclusion is much less pessimistic than theirs, because (3) it makes
+it very plain that the evils which threaten the future of mankind are
+in no case unavoidable. If it is called ‘pessimism’ to point out the
+methods by which men may escape destruction, because men do not care
+to adopt them, I suppose it must be ‘optimism’ to rush violently and
+open-eyed down a precipice, and to expect to be saved by a miracle.
+Certainly such would appear to be the belief upon which human affairs
+are at present conducted.
+
+                                                              F.C.S.S.
+
+
+
+
+TANTALUS
+
+
+
+
+TANTALUS
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE: THE ORACLE OF THE DEAD
+
+
+When I read in Mr Haldane’s _Daedalus_ the wonderful things that
+Science was going to do for us, and in Mr Russell’s _Icarus_ how easily
+both we and it might come to grief in consequence, it at once became
+plain to me that of all the heroes of antiquity Tantalus would be the
+one best fitted to prognosticate the probable future of Man. For, if
+we interpret the history of Daedalus as meaning the collapse of Minoan
+civilization under the strain imposed on its moral fibre by material
+progress, and the fate of Icarus as meaning man’s inability to use the
+powers of the air without crashing, one could gauge the probability
+that history would repeat itself still further, and that man would
+once more allow his vices to cheat him of the happiness that seemed so
+clearly within his reach.
+
+I determined, however, to confirm this intelligent forecast by
+consulting Tantalus himself. To consult the oracle of a dead hero, it
+was, I knew, only necessary to undergo the process of ‘incubation,’ a
+sort of camping out on his tomb, in the skin of a sacrificial beast;
+and fortunately the tomb of Tantalus had just been discovered in
+Phrygia by the archæologists of the British School at Athens.
+
+I set out, therefore, with great promptitude, and in due course,
+arrived at the ruins of the tomb of Tantalus. They did not much
+resemble a first-class hotel, and, of course, my idea of an
+‘incubation’ was well laughed at, but I managed to find a pretty level
+corner, more or less sheltered from the wind. Here I wrapped myself up
+in my excellent rug, having decided to dispense with the more correct
+method of ensconcing myself in the gory hide of a sacrificial ox. The
+night was fine, though cold, and fortunately there were no mosquitoes,
+nor any of the other insects one would inevitably have encountered in
+the dwellings of the living. But the ground was very, very, hard, and
+I tossed about for hours, regretting my classical education and the
+psychical researcher’s rashness in trying foolish experiments.
+
+At last I fell asleep, at least I suppose so. I also fell a great deal
+further. I seemed to go right through my rocky bed, and to fall down,
+down, down, interminably, through a sort of elastic space. When at last
+the not wholly unpleasant motion stopped, I found myself in a vast,
+grey, sandy plain, illuminated by a cold grey light as though of dawn.
+The only thing to catch the eye was a small round hummock, not very far
+from me. On it grew a mighty tree, with dark green pointed leaves and
+drooping branches, surrounded by a gleaming white fence or paling. I
+naturally walked towards it.
+
+As I got near, I noticed that the white paling, which completely
+enclosed the hummock, was composed of _bones_, or rather of every
+imaginable sort of spine, tooth and sting, garnished with the saws
+and swords of sawfish and swordfish, and all knit together into an
+impenetrable _cheval de frise_ that prevented approach to the foot of
+the tree. The soil all round this strange hedge had apparently been
+trodden into deep mud by some creature that had walked round and round
+the tree, and the water required for its manufacture was supplied by a
+small spring which rose within the enclosure and flowed out through its
+interstices.
+
+As I walked round the tree to the further side of the hummock, I came
+upon an extraordinary sight. I beheld a naked man trying to reach some
+of the fruit that dangled down from the outer branches of the tree but
+appeared to be just out of his reach, and so intent upon his design
+that he did not notice my approach. He seemed a tall man, and the upper
+part of his body was well formed. His features were good and regular,
+though somewhat hard, and not intellectual; his resolute jaw bespoke
+the man of action, accustomed to command and to be obeyed. So far, his
+appearance would have done credit to any modern captain of industry.
+But the lower half of his body appeared to be misshapen. His thighs
+were so curved that he could not walk upright, but had to stoop and
+lean forward as he slowly shambled along. Still more monstrous seemed
+the feet, with which he churned up the mud around the fence; they were
+enormous and hardly seemed human in their shape, though they were too
+deeply plunged in the mud to permit one to see what exactly was wrong
+with them.
+
+This strange being, whom the bold intuition of the dream-consciousness
+at once identified with Tantalus, was evidently trying to grasp the
+fruit that hung from the lower branches of the tree. For a while his
+efforts were vain, but then a gust of wind brought within his reach a
+large conical shining red fruit he had long coveted. It was one of the
+strange features of the tree that it was covered with fruit, and higher
+up also with flowers, of the most various sizes, shapes, and colours.
+He seized it triumphantly; but the effect was surprising. For he had
+hardly touched it when it exploded, and covered him from head to foot
+with its blood-red juice. He at once sank senseless to the ground. But,
+after a while, he slowly recovered, and recommenced his old game. This
+time, he attacked a large round yellowish fruit; but when he succeeded
+in seizing it, it too exploded, and poured out upon him volumes of a
+heavy yellow-green vapour. Again he collapsed, and this time his stupor
+lasted longer.
+
+By the time he began to stir again I had, I thought, grasped the
+situation, and determined to intervene. So I drew near, and addressed
+him: “Can I be mistaken in thinking that I see before me the far-famed
+hero, Tantalus, boon companion of the gods?” “And their victim.”
+“And what tree is this, I pray you, about which you busy yourself?”
+“The Tree of Knowledge.” “And the water, which you have trampled
+into mud, is what?” “The Elixir of Life.” “Then you seem to have all
+the materials for a happy life. Why don’t you eat of the fruits of
+the tree, and drink of the elixir?” “You have seen the results of my
+efforts.” “I cannot but think you have been unfortunate in your choice
+of the fruits: there are many that look much better higher up.” “And
+how am I to get at them?” “Well, of course, you must break through
+all these _debris_ of former animal life, which bar your access to
+the trunk of the tree, and prevent you from drinking of the water of
+life; after that, you can climb up the tree, and pick the best of the
+fruits.” “And how am I to break through the barrier of bones?” “Even
+though you appear to have no instruments, you can surely find a stone?”
+“Where shall I find a stone in the Plain of Forgetfulness? And besides,
+how should I climb the tree with these ... feet?” And he lifted up
+one of his monstrous limbs. “Certainly you seem to be pretty badly
+earth-bound,” said I, “but I will try to find you some stones.”
+
+So off I set. I had not got far when a fierce blast struck me and
+peppered me with sand. I struggled stoutly against it, but was nearly
+choked. And then, suddenly, I awoke to find that day was dawning and
+that the wind had gone round to the north, and was blowing in my face.
+But I was well satisfied with my experiment. The interpretation of the
+response I had obtained from Tantalus was too plain to need the aid of
+a psycho-analyst.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Our best prophets are growing very anxious about our future. They
+are afraid we are getting to know too much, and are likely to use
+our knowledge to commit suicide, or rather, mutual murder, after the
+fashion of the Kilkenny cats.
+
+To these dismal forecasts it is reasonable to reply that there is
+nothing novel in the present situation. The human race has always known
+enough to wreck itself, and its abounding folly has always inspired
+its wise men with the gravest apprehension for its future. Yet,
+either by chance or providence, it has always known also how to avoid
+destruction. It has never known enough to make itself happy; nor does
+it know enough to do so now. Its future has always been precarious,
+because it has always been uncertain whether it would use its knowledge
+well or ill, to improve or to ruin itself. It has always had a choice
+between alternative policies, and it has so now.
+
+What sense then is there in making such a fuss about the present
+crisis? It is a particularly plain case of the perennial choice of
+Hercules. What is needed is just a little clear thinking and plain
+speaking to a society more than usually debauched by a long regime of
+flattery, propaganda, and subterfuge. Mankind _can_ make a fool of
+itself, as it always could; if it does, its blood will be on its own
+head. For it has knowledge enough to avoid the dangers that threaten
+it, if it will use its knowledge properly.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The first fact to be enunciated plainly, and faced, until it grows
+familiar, and its import is appreciated, is that, biologically
+speaking, Man has ceased to be a progressive species long ago. The
+evolutionary impetus which carried our ancestors from the level
+of the ape or even of the lemur, through such subhuman types as
+_Pithecanthropus_, and the Heidelberg and Neanderthal men, to ‘modern’
+man, seems to have spent itself by the middle of the palæolithic
+period, _i.e._ say, thirty thousand years ago. At any rate, the
+Cro-Magnon people of the Aurignacian age, who then appeared upon the
+scene, were in no wise inferior to any subsequent race of men, either
+in stature or in brain capacity. They average six feet three inches
+in height, with one-sixth more brains than the modern European. So
+far indeed as their physical remains can indicate, they seem to have
+been very definitely the finest race of human beings that has ever
+existed. If we have improved on them, it has probably been only in such
+minor matters as resistance to the microbes of the many diseases which
+flourish among dense populations under slum conditions. Against that
+probability have to be set such certainties as that our toes and many
+of our muscles are being atrophied and that we are getting more liable
+to caries and baldness.
+
+This remarkable fact of the arrest of his biological development is
+certainly the greatest mystery in the history of Man. It at once
+raises two further questions: In the first place, how did it happen,
+and what caused it? And, secondly, what has enabled man, nevertheless,
+to progress in other respects, in knowledge, in power, and in culture?
+
+To answer the first question we cannot do better than argue back from
+what is now the most salient feature about man’s biological position,
+namely that his survival is determined far more by his relations to
+the social group to which he belongs than by personal efficiency:
+hence he can draw on the collective resources of his tribe, and, to a
+growing extent, gets emancipated from the control of natural selection.
+Thus social selection and the survival of societies profoundly modify
+(and often defeat), the working of natural selection. The advantages
+are obvious; it is no longer essential for a member of a society that
+collectively controls the conditions of existence to develop any high
+degree of personal capacity, in order to survive. A single wise and
+provident minister, like Joseph, is enough to keep alive millions of
+Pharaoh’s subjects through the lean years of famine. But the inferior
+and incompetent survive with the rest.
+
+Now, if we suppose that by mid-palæolithic times man had established
+his ascendency over nature and perfected his social organization
+sufficiently to render these services to his fellows, we have suggested
+a possible cause of the cessation of biological progress. For social
+influences are as likely as not to be ‘contra-selective,’ that is, to
+tend to preserve by preference the stocks which are less viable from
+a merely biological point of view. They are markedly so at present,
+and it would be asking too much to expect the tribal chiefs of early
+men to have been wise and provident enough to see to it that their
+social institutions were eugenical in their effects. We cannot even now
+find such a pitch of wisdom and providence in the controllers of our
+destinies.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The answer to the second question is much easier. The human race has
+continued to progress in its culture, in its knowledge, in its power
+over nature, because it has devised institutions which have created
+for it a continuous social memory that defies death. Now, as ever, the
+wisest and the best must die, while their place is taken by babies
+born as ignorant and void of knowledge as in the beginning. Only there
+has been invented apparatus which relieves the civilized baby of his
+hereditary ignorance, and renders him potentially the heir to all the
+wisdom of the ages.
+
+In the first place, _Language_ not only extends enormously the
+possibilities of co-operation and common action, but also renders
+possible the consolidation of customs and their preservation by oral
+tradition. In the next place, _Writing_ enables a society to record
+all that it considers worth remembering. Upon these two inventions may
+be reared vast intricate structures, religious, political, social,
+and scientific, which knit together and dominate human societies from
+generation to generation, and create the conditions for an almost
+mechanical accumulation of knowledge.
+
+Man has thereby become an educable creature and fallen a victim to the
+arts of the examiner. Provided the mechanisms of education do not get
+out of gear, it is hard to set limits to the amounts of knowledge with
+which he can be crammed; but it is clear that they are far greater
+than he could ever have acquired in a lifetime for himself. And as
+education (of sorts) has now become world wide, it might seem that the
+future of knowledge was now assured, and no longer liable to setbacks
+such as those due to the famous burning of the library of Alexandria
+at the command of the Caliph Omar, or the extinction of the only Greek
+scientists who seriously concerned themselves with the applications of
+science to life, of Archimedes and his School, in the sack of Syracuse.
+At any rate, it seemed clear that progress in knowledge could continue
+indefinitely, even in an otherwise stationary or decadent society.
+
+Whoever argued thus would fail to make sufficient allowance for the
+perversity of human nature. Human institutions, like the human body,
+are ever tending to get clogged with the waste products of their
+own working. Hence, so far from performing the functions for which
+they were intended, they are constantly becoming the most formidable
+instruments for their frustration. Experience shows how easily Churches
+become the most effective deadeners of religious zeal, how often Law
+becomes the negation of justice, how deadly is the School to the inborn
+craving for knowledge which seemed to Aristotle so characteristic of
+man’s nature.
+
+Accordingly, no one familiar with the actual working of academic
+institutions is likely to fall into the error of pinning his faith to
+them. They are, of course, designed for the purpose of preserving and
+promoting the highest and most advanced knowledge hitherto attained:
+but do they anywhere fulfil this purpose? Its execution must of
+necessity be left to professors not exempt from human frailty, always
+selected by more or less defective methods, whose interests by no
+means coincide with those of their subjects. The interest of the
+subject is to become more widely understood and so more influential.
+The interest of the professor is to become more unassailable, and so
+more authoritative. He achieves this by becoming more technical. For
+the more technical he gets, the fewer can comprehend him; the fewer
+are competent to criticize him, the more of an oracle he becomes; if,
+therefore, he wishes for an easy life of undisturbed academic leisure,
+the more he will indulge his natural tendency to grow more technical as
+his knowledge grows, the more he will turn away from those aspects of
+his subject which have any direct practical or human interest. He will
+wrap himself in mysteries of technical jargon, and become as nearly
+as possible unintelligible. Truly, as William James once exclaimed to
+me, apropos of the policy of certain philosophers, “the natural enemy
+of any subject is the professor thereof!” It is clear that if these
+tendencies are allowed to prevail, every subject must in course of time
+become unteachable, and not worth learning.
+
+Thus educational systems become the chief enemies of education, and
+seats of learning the chief obstacles to the growth of knowledge, while
+in an otherwise stagnant or decadent society these tendencies sooner
+or later get the upper hand and utterly corrupt the social memory.
+The power of the professor is revealed not so much by the things he
+teaches, as by the things he fails or refuses to teach.
+
+History is full of examples. How many religions have not perished
+from ritual sclerosis, how many sciences have not been degraded into
+pseudo-sciences or games! Logic has been just examinable nonsense for
+over two thousand years. The present economic chaos in the world has
+been indirectly brought about by the policy adopted by the professors
+of economics forty or fifty years ago, to suit their own convenience.
+For they then decided that they must escape from the unwelcome
+attentions of the public by becoming more ‘scientific’; _i.e._ they
+ceased to express themselves in plain language and took to mathematical
+formulae and curves instead; with the result that the world promptly
+relapsed into its primitive depths of economic ignorance. So soon as
+the professors had retired from it, every economic heresy and delusion,
+which had been exposed and uprooted by Adam Smith, at once revived
+and flourished. In one generation economics disappeared completely
+from the public ken and the political world, and the makers of the
+Peace Treaties of 1919 were so incapable of understanding an economic
+argument that not even the lucid intelligence of Mr Keynes could
+dissuade them from enacting the preposterous conditions which rendered
+impossible the realization of their aims.[A] Nor was it so very long
+ago that, in order to save the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, it
+had to be recast, because it had degenerated into an intellectual
+jig-saw puzzle, wholly unrelated to the applications of mathematics
+to the other sciences. To avoid jealousies, I hasten to add that the
+University of Oxford, which has organized itself as an asylum for
+lost causes, skilfully cultivates, by means of its classical and
+historical studies, a backward-looking bias in its _alumni_. The true
+‘Greats’ man is meant to go down indelibly imbued with the conviction
+that in matters of morals and politics nothing of importance has been
+discovered or said since Plato and Aristotle, and that nothing else
+matters.
+
+Clearly then we cannot take for granted that in any society knowledge
+can progress without limits, nor can we count on our academic
+institutions to save us from stagnation and decay, even in matters of
+knowledge. All institutions are social mechanisms, and all mechanisms
+need a modicum of intelligent supervision, in the absence of which they
+become dangerous engines of destruction.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+It appears then that we can extract no guarantee of progress either
+from the nature of Man or from the nature of human institutions. There
+is no _law_ of progress, if by law be meant a superior power able to
+coerce the creatures that are said to ‘obey’ it. Neither can we extract
+from history any proof of the superiority of civilized man over his
+uncivilized ancestors. Such progress as has been attained has been
+achieved only by the active co-operation of the progressive organisms:
+every step has been fought for, and progress has ceased whenever
+effort ceased, or was switched off into different directions.
+
+Consequently, modern man has no right to ‘boast himself far better
+than his fathers’--in intrinsic quality. Intrinsically, _i.e._ apart
+from the effects of culture and social training, it is probable that
+he is slightly _inferior_ in capacity to his own ancestors, while
+very markedly inferior to the great races of antiquity (like the
+Greeks) in their hey-day. Nor is there any reason to suppose that his
+moral nature has changed materially. Modern man may be a little tamer
+and better-tempered, because he has been herded together much more
+closely than primitive man, and city life, even in slums, demands,
+and produces, a certain ‘urbanity.’ For many generations those who
+would not pack tight and could not stand the strain of constantly
+exhibiting ‘company manners’ and accommodating their action to those
+of their fellows, must have fled away into the wilds, where they could
+be independent, or have eliminated themselves in other ways, _e.g._ by
+committing murder. It is probable that the social history of Iceland,
+settled as it was by unbridled individualists who would not brook any
+form of organized government, might throw some light on this process of
+taming the individual.
+
+Nevertheless there is little doubt that, in the main, humanity is
+still Yahoo-manity. Alike in mentality and in _moral_, modern man is
+still substantially identical with his palæolithic ancestors. He is
+still the irrational, impulsive, emotional, foolish, destructive,
+cruel, credulous, creature he always was. Normally the Yahoo in him
+is kept under control by the constant pressure of a variety of social
+institutions; but let anything upset an established social order, and
+the Yahoo comes to the front at once. The history of the past fifty
+years abundantly proves that man is still capable of atrocities equal
+to any in his record. Not only have we lived through the greatest
+political and the deadliest natural convulsion, the Great War and the
+Tokio earthquake, but the Russian Revolution has outdone the French and
+Landru the legendary Bluebeard, while for mingled atrocity and baseness
+the murders of Rasputin and of Alexander of Serbia are unsurpassed in
+history. The painful truth is that civilization has not improved Man’s
+moral nature. His moral habits are still mainly matters of custom, and
+the effect of moral theories is nugatory everywhere. Thus civilization
+is not even skin deep; it does not go deeper than the clothes.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Clearly it is risky to expose the inelastic nature of so stubbornly
+conservative a creature to new conditions at a rapid rate. He may not
+be able to adapt himself quickly enough, and his old reactions, which
+did little or no harm before, may become extremely dangerous. Yet this
+is just what has happened. Science has exposed the palæolithic savage
+masquerading in modern garb to a series of physical and mental shocks
+which have endangered his equilibrium. It has also enormously extended
+his power and armed him with a variety of delicate and penetrating
+instruments which have often proved edge tools in his hands and which
+the utmost wisdom could hardly be trusted to use aright. Under these
+conditions the fighting instinct ceases to be an antiquated foible,
+like the hunting instinct, and becomes a deadly danger. No wonder the
+more prescient are dismayed at the prospect of the old savage passions
+running amok in the full panoply of civilization!
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Nor is this the final item in our tale of woe. A third and most
+sinister fact which has to be faced is that Civilization, as at present
+constituted, is very definitely a deteriorating agency, conducing to
+the degeneration of mankind. This effect of Civilization is nothing
+new, but has been operating, it would seem, from the beginning,
+though not probably as intensively as now: its discovery, however, is
+very recent. It is quite indirect, unintended, and fortuitous, but
+cumulative, and in the long run has probably been a chief cause in the
+decay of States and civilizations, as well as an important factor in
+the arrest of biological development which we have had to recognize.
+
+A simple and easily observable sociological fact is at the bottom
+of the mischief. The different classes in a society have different
+birth-rates and death-rates, and the differences between these yield
+their several net rates of increase or decrease. Now, whereas under
+the conditions of savage life class differences can hardly exist, or,
+at least cannot be accentuated, so that the whole tribe flourishes or
+perishes together, and among barbarians the upper classes have a very
+great advantage and the tribe recruits itself chiefly from the children
+of the chiefs, because the conditions of life are so severe that
+the lower classes are not able to rear many children; in civilized
+societies these conditions are reversed. It is found that though both
+birth-rates and death-rates grow as we descend the social scale, so
+does the net rate of increase. Indeed, the highest or ruling class
+nowhere appears to keep up its numbers without considerable recruitment
+from below. So society, as at present organized, is always dying off at
+the top, and proliferating at the bottom, of the social pyramid.
+
+The disastrous consequences of this sort of social organization may
+easily be apprehended, with a little reflection. (1) All societies,
+even those whose social structure is most rigid, have need of ability,
+discover it, and reward it by social promotion. But (2) as this
+promotion means passing into a class with a relatively inadequate
+rate of reproduction, the biological penalty attaching to social
+promotion is racial extinction. Thus (3) the ultimate reward of merit
+is sterilization, and society appears to be an organization devoted to
+the suicidal task of extirpating any ability it may chance to contain,
+by draining it away from any stratum in which it may occur, promoting
+it into the highest, and there destroying it. It is exactly as though a
+dairyman should set in motion apparatus for separating the cream from
+the milk, and then, as it rose, skim it off, and throw it away!
+
+At present it is calculated that the highest classes in the chief
+civilized societies only reproduce themselves to the extent of fifty
+per cent. of their number in each generation, so that the hereditary
+ability of half of them is lost in each generation. But even then the
+remainder is largely wasted. It is churned into froth and scum by
+social forces. For neither now nor at any time has social intelligence
+shown itself equal to devising a training for the youth of the highest
+classes that would provide them with adequate stimuli to develop their
+faculties, and to lead a strenuous life of social service. The children
+of the rich are tempted to live for ‘society’ in the narrower sense,
+which means frittering away one’s life on a round of vacuous amusement;
+and they rarely resist the temptation.
+
+Naturally it is difficult to trace the accumulation of ability in the
+upper social strata which is theoretically to be expected. On the other
+hand, in some subjects at any rate, the symptoms of a world-wide
+dearth of ability are becoming unmistakable. The Great War, though it
+made abundantly manifest the prevalence of incompetents in high places,
+did not reveal the existence either of a great general or of a great
+statesman anywhere.
+
+It is superfluous to insist either on the fatuity of a social
+organization such as this, or on the certainty of racial degeneration
+which it entails: but it may be well to draw attention to the
+_rapidity_ with which these degenerative processes are at present
+sapping the vitality and value of our civilized races. The failure to
+reproduce does not, as in former times, affect merely the aristocracy
+in the highest social strata; it has spread to the whole of the
+professional and middle classes, and to most classes of skilled
+labour. It is not too much to say that, with the exception of the
+miners, none of the desirable elements in the nation are doing their
+bit to keep up the population, and that its continued growth is mainly
+due to the unrestrained breeding of the casual labourers and the
+feeble-minded.
+
+In the rest of the population its increase is checked by birth-control
+and the postponement of marriage, neither of which affects the
+undesirables. They are too stupid, reckless, and ignorant to practise
+the former, and have nothing to gain by the latter. Also, to make it
+quite certain that they shall form a true ‘proletariate,’ the wisdom
+of our rulers ordains that a knowledge of birth-control shall be a
+(fatal) privilege reserved for the intelligent and well-to-do. They
+instruct the police to prevent it from penetrating to the poor and
+stupid--apparently from the mistaken idea that the State needs plenty
+of cheap labour and cheap cannon-fodder. So child-bearing remains
+compulsory for the wretched women of the poor, whereas elsewhere only
+those women produce children who desire them, and natural selection is
+thus allowed gradually to eliminate the temperament of the unwilling
+(and, therefore, probably less competent) mother.
+
+The dysgenic effects of this class-discrimination are further
+intensified by other tendencies: (1) The advance of medicine and
+hygiene has enormously diminished selective mortality in all classes,
+and improved the chances of weaklings to survive and leave descendants.
+(2) The advance of philanthropy preserves them, especially in the lower
+classes, where formerly the mortality was largely selective and a high
+death-rate both counteracted an excessive birth-rate and increased the
+value of the survivors. The emotional appeal of ‘baby-saving’ goes so
+directly to the heart of civilized man that his head never reflects
+whether the particular baby is worth saving, and whether a baby from a
+different breed and with a better pedigree would not be better worth
+having. (3) Modern obstetrics save the lives of thousands of women,
+whose physique is such that in former times they would inevitably
+have died in child-birth. The result is that child-birth is becoming
+more difficult. Also babies brought up on the bottle, which has an
+irresistible attraction for microbes of all sorts, are apt to be less
+healthy than those nourished in the more primitive manner.
+
+(4) Lastly, the bastardizing, which used formerly to provide for a
+considerable infusion of the blood of the upper classes into the lower,
+has now practically ceased. Since the merry days of King Charles
+II, very few noble families of royal descent have been added to the
+peerage.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Our civilization, therefore, carries within it the seeds of its own
+decay and destruction, and it does not require high prophetic gifts
+to predict the future of a race which goes the way marked out for
+it by such perversely suicidal institutions. It cannot improve, but
+must degenerate, and the only question would seem to be whether the
+decadence of Man will leave him viable as a biological species. At
+present it looks very much as though his blind leaders would lead
+their blinder followers from catastrophe to catastrophe, through
+imperialist world-wars to class-wars and to race-wars: but even if, by
+some miraculous rally of human intelligence, these convulsions should
+be averted, the prospect will not really be improved. The violent
+destruction of the human race by war will only be more _dramatic_:
+it will not be more _fatal_ than its gradual decay as its arts and
+sciences slowly fossilize, or peter out, in an overwhelming flood of
+feeble-mindedness.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+This is the one alternative. We shall get to it, if we go on as we
+are going: but it is not our doom. The alternative is to exercise the
+danger by an adequate reform of human nature and of human institutions.
+This again seems attainable in at least two ways.
+
+The first, and more paradoxical, of these would make a direct frontal
+attack on the palæolithic Yahoo, and try to bring about his moral
+reformation. The means for this purpose are ready to hand. Christian
+ethics have been in being, as a moral theory, for nearly two thousand
+years. If the Yahoo could be really christianized, he would at any
+rate cease to cut his own throat in cutting his neighbour’s. And it
+is astonishing how much scientific support is forthcoming for the
+paradoxes of Christian ethics. It is an historical fact that the meek
+have a knack of inheriting the earth after their lords and masters
+have killed each other off, and that passive resistance wears out the
+greatest violence, and conscientious objection defeats the craftiest
+opportunism, if only you can get enough of them. It is a biological
+fact that the rabbit survives better than the tiger; and the same would
+appear to be true of the human ‘rabbit’ and the Nietzschean ‘wild
+beast.’ Intrinsically, therefore, Christian ethics might be well worth
+trying.
+
+I wish I could believe it likely that this policy will be tried. But
+the palæolithic Yahoo has been dosed with Christian ethics for two
+thousand years, and they have never either impressed or improved
+him. Their paradoxes give him a moral shock, and he has not brains
+enough to grasp their rationality. He will exclaim rather with the
+gallant admiral in the House of Commons, when justly indignant at
+the unheard-of notion that a ‘moral gesture’ of a Labour Government
+might be the best policy, “Good God, sir, if we are to rely for our
+air security on the Sermon on the Mount, all I can say is, ‘_God help
+us!_’” Besides, the proposal to put Christian principles into practice
+would be bitterly opposed by all the Churches in Christendom.[B]
+
+It may be more prudent, therefore, to try a safer though slower
+way, that of the eugenical reform and reconstruction of our social
+organization. As to the possibilities in this direction, I incline to
+be much more hopeful than either Mr Haldane or Mr Russell. Mr Haldane
+despises eugenics, because he is looking for the more spectacular
+advent of the ‘ectogenetic baby,’ to be the Saviour of mankind. But he
+might not arrive, or be seriously delayed in transmission, or fail to
+come up to Mr Haldane’s expectations; and, meanwhile, we cannot afford
+to wait.
+
+Mr Russell distrusts eugenics, because he fears that any eugenical
+scheme put into practice will be ‘nobbled’ by our present ruling rings,
+and perverted into an instrument to consolidate their power. He thinks
+that dissent from dominant beliefs and institutions will be taken as
+proof of imbecility, and sterilized accordingly,[C] and that the result
+would merely be to spread over all the world the hopeless uniformity
+and commonplaceness of the ideals and practice of the American business
+man, as depicted by Mr Sinclair Lewis.
+
+This prognostication would be very plausible, if we supposed eugenics
+to be introduced into the social structure from above, privily, and in
+small doses, and by way of administrative order, as under the existing
+Acts to check the spread of feeble-mindedness.
+
+But this method would be impracticable. It would not generate anything
+like the social momentum necessary to carry through any radical
+reform. To make it effective, it would have to be backed by a powerful,
+enthusiastic, and intelligent public sentiment. This presupposes that
+the public has been biologically educated to appreciate the actual
+situation, and has been thoroughly wrought up about the fatuity of our
+social order, and understands what is wrong with it. If it understands
+that much, it can also be made to see that it is fantastic to expect
+to leap to the Ideal State by a social revolution. No one now knows
+what the institutions of an Ideal State would be like, nor how they
+would work. We only know that they will have to be evolved out of our
+present institutions, even as the Superman has to be evolved out of the
+primitive Yahoo. In either case, the process will be gradual, and its
+success will depend upon details, on taking one step after another at
+the right rate in the right direction, making a new adjustment here,
+overcoming an old difficulty there, removing obstacles, smoothing
+over the shell-holes and scars dating from Man’s lurid past, and, in
+general, feeling one’s way systematically and scientifically to better
+things. Such a mode of progression may seem unheroic, but it has the
+great advantage that it is unlikely to go irretrievably wrong. If we
+know from the outset that we are tentatively feeling our way, we shall
+always be on the look out for traps and possibilities of going astray,
+trying out the value of our policies by their results, and willing to
+retrace our steps when we have made a false one.
+
+The social temper, therefore, will become far more intelligent and
+reasonable than it has been hitherto. It will be slow to dogmatize,
+and will regard the _toleration_ of differences of opinion as among
+the cardinal principles of a sanely progressive social order. For
+as we can no longer assume, with Plato and the other Utopians, that
+_perfection_ may be postulated, provision has always to be made for
+the _improvement_ of the social order. It can never be accepted as
+absolutely good, but must always be regarded as capable, in principle,
+of being bettered. Even the best of established institutions are only
+good relatively to the alternatives to which they showed themselves
+superior: under changed conditions they may become inferior, and may
+fail us, or ruin us, if we do not make haste to transform them into
+something better fitted to the new conditions. Hence the social order
+must be _plastic_, and must never be allowed to grow rigid. There must
+always be room in it for experiments that have a reasonable prospect of
+turning out to be improvements. For progress will depend on the timely
+adoption of such novelties.
+
+But society has no means of commanding them at will. It has to wait
+till they occur to some one. As biological variations have to arise
+spontaneously before they can be selected, so valuable new ideas
+have to occur in a human mind before they can be tried and approved.
+Society cannot originate discoveries, it can only refrain from so
+organizing itself as to stamp them out when they occur. It is vitally
+necessary, therefore, that we should beware of suppressing variations,
+whether of thought or of bodily endowment, that may prove to be
+valuable.
+
+Also, of course, we shall have to realize that our whole procedure is
+_essentially experimental_, and all that this implies. We do not know,
+at the outset, what would be the best obtainable type, either of man or
+of society; true, but we mean to find out. Nor is it unreasonable to
+expect to do so as we go along. We start with a pretty shrewd suspicion
+that certain types, say the feeble-minded, the sickly, the insane, are
+undesirable, and that no good can come of coddling and cultivating
+them: we similarly are pretty sure that certain other types, say the
+intelligent, healthy, and energetic, are inherently superior to the
+former. We try, therefore, to improve and increase the better types.
+How precisely, and how most effectively we do not quite know, though we
+can make pretty good preliminary guesses. So we try. That will entail
+experimentation in a variety of directions, with ‘control experiments,’
+and a modicum of mistakes. But our mistakes will not be fatal, because
+if we advance tentatively and with intelligent apprehension, we shall
+realize them in time, and shall not feel bound to persist in any course
+that yields unsatisfactory results.
+
+It is really one of the great advantages of eugenics that it cannot
+proceed upon any cut-and-dried scheme, but will have to be guided by
+the results of experiment and the fruits of experience, each of which
+will be followed and discussed by an intensely interested public.
+For the difficulties of eugenics are all difficulties of detail,
+and intelligent attention to detail may overcome them all. Thus
+the dysgenical working of civilized society, which has come about
+unintentionally through the unfortunate convergence of a number of
+tendencies, may be altered similarly, by changing the incidence of
+social forces.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+If scientific eugenics can put a stop to the contra-selection
+incidental to civilization, Man will recover the plasticity and
+the progressiveness he once possessed, and will be able to evolve
+further--in whatever direction seems to him best. We need not take
+alarm at this possibility, for with his superior knowledge he may
+surely be trusted to make a better job of his evolution than the
+_Lemur_ and the _Pithecanthropus_, who were our progenitors and managed
+to evolve into modern man.
+
+But the process will necessarily be a slow one, even though a
+comprehensive scheme of eugenics will be providing simultaneously _two_
+sources of improvement, by the elimination of defectives at the bottom
+of the social scale, and by the increase of ability at the top. As,
+moreover, time presses, and sheer destruction may overtake us before
+eugenics have made much difference, it would be highly desirable if
+some means could be found to accelerate the change of heart required.
+For this purpose, I am much less inclined to put my trust in the
+advance of pharmacology than Mr Haldane and Mr Russell.[D] Hitherto
+new drugs have only meant new vices, sometimes (like cocaine) of so
+fascinating a character as to distract the whole police force from
+their proper function of repressing crime. So it seems legitimate to
+be very sceptical about moral transformation scenes to be wrought by
+pills and injections.
+
+On the other hand there does seem to be a science from the possible
+progress of which something of a sensational kind might not
+unreasonably be expected. It is, moreover, the science most directly
+concerned with affairs of this sort. Psychology, the science of human
+mentality, is, by common consent, in a deplorably backward state. It
+has remained a ground for metaphysical excursions and a playground for
+the arbitrary pedantries of classificatory systematists. Its efforts
+to become scientific have only led it to ape assumptions and to borrow
+notions found to be appropriate in sciences with widely different
+problems and objects. The results, as the psychologists themselves
+confess, are meagre and disappointing; which, of course, only proves
+that the borrowed notions are inappropriate and incapable of making
+Psychology into an effective science. But if psychologists should
+take it into their heads to settle down to business, to recognize
+the primary obligation of every science to develop methods and
+conceptions capable of working upon its subject-matter, and so tried
+to authenticate their ‘truth’ after the ordinary fashion of the other
+sciences, namely by the pragmatic test of successful working, some
+surprising effects might be elicited even from the actual human mind.
+
+For there is reason to suppose that its present organization is very
+far from being the best of which it is capable. It has come about in a
+very haphazard manner, and we are not at present making anything like
+an adequate use of all our powers. Hence by changing the gearing and
+re-arranging the traditional coupling, so to speak, of our faculties,
+improvements might conceivably be wrought which would seem to us to
+border on the miraculous. Thus a pragmatically efficient Psychology
+might actually invert the miracle of Circe, and really transform the
+Yahoo into a man.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+I have endeavoured in this very summary sketch to show that the doom of
+Tantalus is by no means unconditional, and that he can save himself if
+he chooses, and that by no superhuman effort, but merely by recognizing
+facts that are right before his nose and well within his comprehension,
+and by a little clear thinking upon their import. But I would not
+presume to predict that he _will_ save himself: history affords no
+unambiguous guide. It seems to show that something worse and something
+better than what actually happens is always conceivable, and that
+neither our hopes nor our fears are ever fully realized. If so, poor
+Tantalus, hoping against hope, fearing against reason, may muddle along
+for a good while yet, without repeating either his ancient error of
+imagining that he could sup with the gods, or his modern folly of using
+his reason, as Goethe’s Mephistopheles declared, only to become more
+bestial than any beast!
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+
+[A] The most absurd perhaps was the clause, appearing in all the Peace
+Treaties, which made ‘reparations’ a first charge on all the assets of
+the defeated countries. This, of course, completely destroyed their
+credit, and incapacitated them from raising a loan, forcing them to
+have recourse to progressive inflation, and so into bankruptcy.
+
+[B] This does _not_ mean, of course, that there are no Christians
+in the Churches, but only that they are not in control of these
+institutions.
+
+[C] _Icarus_, p. 49.
+
+[D] cf. _Daedalus_, p. 34; _Icarus_, p. 54.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
+
+
+  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
+
+  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+
+
+
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TANTALUS ***
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-<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TANTALUS ***</div>

-

-<div class="figcenter hide"><img src="images/coversmall.jpg" width="450" alt="cover"></div>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<h1>TANTALUS</h1>

-

-<p class="ph2">OR<br>

-

-THE FUTURE OF MAN</p>

-</div>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<div class="poetry-container">

-<div class="poetry">

-<div class="bbox">

-

-<p class="ph3">TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW<br>

-SERIES</p>

-

-<hr class="full">

-

-<p>DAEDALUS, or Science and the Future<br>

-<span class="indent"><i>By J. B. S. Haldane</i></span></p>

-

-<p>ICARUS, or The Future of Science<br>

-<span class="indent"><i>By Bertrand Russell, F. R. S.</i></span></p>

-

-<p>THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST<br>

-<span class="indent"><i>By F. G. Crookshank, M.D.</i></span></p>

-

-<p>WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES<br>

-<span class="indent"><i>By Prof. A. M. Low</i></span></p>

-

-<p>NARCISSUS, or The Anatomy of Clothes<br>

-<span class="indent"><i>By Gerald Heard</i></span></p>

-

-<p>TANTALUS, or The Future of Man<br>

-<span class="indent"><i>By F. C. S. Schiller</i></span></p>

-

-<p class="center"><span class="smcap">In Preparation</span></p>

-

-<p>THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS<br>

-<span class="indent"><i>By Professor Patten</i></span></p>

-

-<p>WOMAN AND THE FUTURE<br>

-<span class="indent"><i>By Anthony M. Ludovici</i></span></p>

-

-<hr class="full">

-

-<p class="ph1">E. P. DUTTON &amp; COMPANY</p>

-</div></div></div></div>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_title.jpg" alt="title page"></div>

-</div>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="titlepage">

-<p><span class="xxlarge">TANTALUS</span><br>

-

-<span class="large">OR</span><br>

-

-<span class="xxlarge">The Future of Man</span></p>

-

-<p>BY<br>

-

-<span class="large">F. C. S. SCHILLER</span><br>

-

-<i>M.A., D.Sc.; Fellow and Tutor of<br>

-Corpus Christi College, Oxford</i></p>

-

-<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_titlelogo.jpg" alt="publisher's logo"></div>

-

-<p><i>Man never is, but always to be, blest</i></p>

-

-<p><span class="smcap">New York</span><br>

-<span class="large">E. P. DUTTON &amp; COMPANY</span><br>

-<span class="smcap">681 Fifth Avenue</span></p>

-</div>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p class="center">Copyright 1924<br>

-By <span class="smcap">E. P. Dutton</span> &amp; <span class="smcap">Company</span><br>

-<br>

-<i>All Rights Reserved</i><br>

-<br>

-<i>First Printing, November, 1924<br>

-Second Printing, March, 1925</i><br>

-<br>

-<br>

-Printed in the United States of America</p>

-</div>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">[v]</span>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak">PREFACE</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>I rather anticipate that superficial

-critics who do not like the argument of

-this essay will accuse it of pessimism, a

-charge which perhaps means little more

-than that they do not like it. Nevertheless,

-it may be worth while to point out,

-(1) that pessimism is not a logical objection

-to a contention of which the

-truth cannot otherwise be questioned,

-and (2) that though the argument of

-<i>Tantalus</i> may be said generally to corroborate

-that of <i>Daedalus</i> and <i>Icarus</i>,

-yet its conclusion is much less pessimistic

-than theirs, because (3) it makes it

-very plain that the evils which threaten

-the future of mankind are in no case<span class="pagenum" id="Page_vi">[vi]</span>

-unavoidable. If it is called ‘pessimism’

-to point out the methods by which men

-may escape destruction, because men do

-not care to adopt them, I suppose it

-must be ‘optimism’ to rush violently

-and open-eyed down a precipice, and to

-expect to be saved by a miracle. Certainly

-such would appear to be the belief

-upon which human affairs are at

-present conducted.</p>

-

-<p class="right">F.C.S.S.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p class="ph2">TANTALUS</p>

-</div>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span>

-<p class="ph2">TANTALUS</p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak">PROLOGUE: THE ORACLE<br>

-OF THE DEAD</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>When I read in Mr Haldane’s <i>Daedalus</i>

-the wonderful things that Science

-was going to do for us, and in Mr Russell’s

-<i>Icarus</i> how easily both we and it

-might come to grief in consequence, it at

-once became plain to me that of all the

-heroes of antiquity Tantalus would be

-the one best fitted to prognosticate the

-probable future of Man. For, if we

-interpret the history of Daedalus as

-meaning the collapse of Minoan civilization

-under the strain imposed on its<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span>

-moral fibre by material progress, and

-the fate of Icarus as meaning man’s

-inability to use the powers of the air

-without crashing, one could gauge the

-probability that history would repeat

-itself still further, and that man would

-once more allow his vices to cheat him

-of the happiness that seemed so clearly

-within his reach.</p>

-

-<p>I determined, however, to confirm

-this intelligent forecast by consulting

-Tantalus himself. To consult the oracle

-of a dead hero, it was, I knew, only

-necessary to undergo the process of

-‘incubation,’ a sort of camping out on

-his tomb, in the skin of a sacrificial

-beast; and fortunately the tomb of

-Tantalus had just been discovered in

-Phrygia by the archæologists of the

-British School at Athens.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span>I set out, therefore, with great

-promptitude, and in due course, arrived

-at the ruins of the tomb of Tantalus.

-They did not much resemble a first-class

-hotel, and, of course, my idea of

-an ‘incubation’ was well laughed at,

-but I managed to find a pretty level

-corner, more or less sheltered from the

-wind. Here I wrapped myself up in my

-excellent rug, having decided to dispense

-with the more correct method of

-ensconcing myself in the gory hide of a

-sacrificial ox. The night was fine,

-though cold, and fortunately there were

-no mosquitoes, nor any of the other

-insects one would inevitably have encountered

-in the dwellings of the living.

-But the ground was very, very, hard,

-and I tossed about for hours, regretting

-my classical education and the psychical<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>

-researcher’s rashness in trying foolish

-experiments.</p>

-

-<p>At last I fell asleep, at least I suppose

-so. I also fell a great deal further. I

-seemed to go right through my rocky

-bed, and to fall down, down, down,

-interminably, through a sort of elastic

-space. When at last the not wholly

-unpleasant motion stopped, I found

-myself in a vast, grey, sandy plain,

-illuminated by a cold grey light as

-though of dawn. The only thing to

-catch the eye was a small round

-hummock, not very far from me. On

-it grew a mighty tree, with dark green

-pointed leaves and drooping branches,

-surrounded by a gleaming white fence

-or paling. I naturally walked towards

-it.</p>

-

-<p>As I got near, I noticed that the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>

-white paling, which completely enclosed

-the hummock, was composed of <i>bones</i>,

-or rather of every imaginable sort of

-spine, tooth and sting, garnished with

-the saws and swords of sawfish and

-swordfish, and all knit together into an

-impenetrable <i>cheval de frise</i> that prevented

-approach to the foot of the tree.

-The soil all round this strange hedge

-had apparently been trodden into deep

-mud by some creature that had walked

-round and round the tree, and the

-water required for its manufacture was

-supplied by a small spring which rose

-within the enclosure and flowed out

-through its interstices.</p>

-

-<p>As I walked round the tree to the

-further side of the hummock, I came

-upon an extraordinary sight. I beheld

-a naked man trying to reach some of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>

-the fruit that dangled down from the

-outer branches of the tree but appeared

-to be just out of his reach, and so intent

-upon his design that he did not notice

-my approach. He seemed a tall man,

-and the upper part of his body was well

-formed. His features were good and

-regular, though somewhat hard, and

-not intellectual; his resolute jaw

-bespoke the man of action, accustomed

-to command and to be obeyed. So

-far, his appearance would have done

-credit to any modern captain of industry.

-But the lower half of his body

-appeared to be misshapen. His thighs

-were so curved that he could not walk

-upright, but had to stoop and lean

-forward as he slowly shambled along.

-Still more monstrous seemed the feet,

-with which he churned up the mud<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>

-around the fence; they were enormous

-and hardly seemed human in their

-shape, though they were too deeply

-plunged in the mud to permit one to

-see what exactly was wrong with them.</p>

-

-<p>This strange being, whom the bold

-intuition of the dream-consciousness

-at once identified with Tantalus, was

-evidently trying to grasp the fruit that

-hung from the lower branches of the

-tree. For a while his efforts were vain,

-but then a gust of wind brought within

-his reach a large conical shining red

-fruit he had long coveted. It was one

-of the strange features of the tree that

-it was covered with fruit, and higher

-up also with flowers, of the most

-various sizes, shapes, and colours. He

-seized it triumphantly; but the effect

-was surprising. For he had hardly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>

-touched it when it exploded, and

-covered him from head to foot with

-its blood-red juice. He at once sank

-senseless to the ground. But, after a

-while, he slowly recovered, and recommenced

-his old game. This time, he

-attacked a large round yellowish fruit;

-but when he succeeded in seizing it,

-it too exploded, and poured out upon

-him volumes of a heavy yellow-green

-vapour. Again he collapsed, and this

-time his stupor lasted longer.</p>

-

-<p>By the time he began to stir again

-I had, I thought, grasped the situation,

-and determined to intervene. So I

-drew near, and addressed him: “Can

-I be mistaken in thinking that I see

-before me the far-famed hero, Tantalus,

-boon companion of the gods?” “And

-their victim.” “And what tree is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>

-this, I pray you, about which you busy

-yourself?” “The Tree of Knowledge.”

-“And the water, which you have

-trampled into mud, is what?” “The

-Elixir of Life.” “Then you seem to

-have all the materials for a happy life.

-Why don’t you eat of the fruits of the

-tree, and drink of the elixir?” “You

-have seen the results of my efforts.”

-“I cannot but think you have been unfortunate

-in your choice of the fruits:

-there are many that look much better

-higher up.” “And how am I to get

-at them?” “Well, of course, you

-must break through all these <i>debris</i> of

-former animal life, which bar your

-access to the trunk of the tree, and

-prevent you from drinking of the

-water of life; after that, you can climb

-up the tree, and pick the best of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>

-fruits.” “And how am I to break

-through the barrier of bones?” “Even

-though you appear to have no instruments,

-you can surely find a stone?”

-“Where shall I find a stone in the Plain

-of Forgetfulness? And besides, how

-should I climb the tree with these

-... feet?” And he lifted up one

-of his monstrous limbs. “Certainly

-you seem to be pretty badly earth-bound,”

-said I, “but I will try to find

-you some stones.”</p>

-

-<p>So off I set. I had not got far when

-a fierce blast struck me and peppered

-me with sand. I struggled stoutly

-against it, but was nearly choked. And

-then, suddenly, I awoke to find that day

-was dawning and that the wind had

-gone round to the north, and was blowing

-in my face. But I was well satisfied<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>

-with my experiment. The interpretation

-of the response I had obtained

-from Tantalus was too plain to need

-the aid of a psycho-analyst.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak">I</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>Our best prophets are growing very

-anxious about our future. They are

-afraid we are getting to know too

-much, and are likely to use our knowledge

-to commit suicide, or rather,

-mutual murder, after the fashion of

-the Kilkenny cats.</p>

-

-<p>To these dismal forecasts it is reasonable

-to reply that there is nothing novel

-in the present situation. The human

-race has always known enough to

-wreck itself, and its abounding folly

-has always inspired its wise men with

-the gravest apprehension for its future.

-Yet, either by chance or providence,

-it has always known also how to avoid

-destruction. It has never known

-enough to make itself happy; nor<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>

-does it know enough to do so now. Its

-future has always been precarious,

-because it has always been uncertain

-whether it would use its knowledge

-well or ill, to improve or to ruin itself.

-It has always had a choice between

-alternative policies, and it has so now.</p>

-

-<p>What sense then is there in making

-such a fuss about the present crisis?

-It is a particularly plain case of the

-perennial choice of Hercules. What is

-needed is just a little clear thinking and

-plain speaking to a society more than

-usually debauched by a long regime of

-flattery, propaganda, and subterfuge.

-Mankind <i>can</i> make a fool of itself, as

-it always could; if it does, its blood

-will be on its own head. For it has

-knowledge enough to avoid the dangers

-that threaten it, if it will use its

-knowledge properly.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak">II</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>The first fact to be enunciated

-plainly, and faced, until it grows

-familiar, and its import is appreciated,

-is that, biologically speaking, Man has

-ceased to be a progressive species long

-ago. The evolutionary impetus which

-carried our ancestors from the level

-of the ape or even of the lemur, through

-such subhuman types as <i>Pithecanthropus</i>,

-and the Heidelberg and Neanderthal

-men, to ‘modern’ man, seems

-to have spent itself by the middle of

-the palæolithic period, <i>i.e.</i> say, thirty

-thousand years ago. At any rate, the

-Cro-Magnon people of the Aurignacian

-age, who then appeared upon the scene,

-were in no wise inferior to any subsequent

-race of men, either in stature or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>

-in brain capacity. They average six

-feet three inches in height, with one-sixth

-more brains than the modern

-European. So far indeed as their

-physical remains can indicate, they

-seem to have been very definitely the

-finest race of human beings that has

-ever existed. If we have improved on

-them, it has probably been only in

-such minor matters as resistance to the

-microbes of the many diseases which

-flourish among dense populations under

-slum conditions. Against that probability

-have to be set such certainties

-as that our toes and many of our

-muscles are being atrophied and that

-we are getting more liable to caries and

-baldness.</p>

-

-<p>This remarkable fact of the arrest

-of his biological development is certainly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>

-the greatest mystery in the history

-of Man. It at once raises two further

-questions: In the first place, how did

-it happen, and what caused it? And,

-secondly, what has enabled man, nevertheless,

-to progress in other respects,

-in knowledge, in power, and in culture?</p>

-

-<p>To answer the first question we

-cannot do better than argue back from

-what is now the most salient feature

-about man’s biological position, namely

-that his survival is determined far more

-by his relations to the social group

-to which he belongs than by personal

-efficiency: hence he can draw on the

-collective resources of his tribe, and,

-to a growing extent, gets emancipated

-from the control of natural selection.

-Thus social selection and the survival

-of societies profoundly modify (and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>

-often defeat), the working of natural

-selection. The advantages are obvious;

-it is no longer essential for a member of

-a society that collectively controls the

-conditions of existence to develop any

-high degree of personal capacity, in

-order to survive. A single wise and

-provident minister, like Joseph, is

-enough to keep alive millions of

-Pharaoh’s subjects through the lean

-years of famine. But the inferior and

-incompetent survive with the rest.</p>

-

-<p>Now, if we suppose that by mid-palæolithic

-times man had established

-his ascendency over nature and perfected

-his social organization sufficiently

-to render these services to his fellows,

-we have suggested a possible cause of

-the cessation of biological progress.

-For social influences are as likely as not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>

-to be ‘contra-selective,’ that is, to tend

-to preserve by preference the stocks

-which are less viable from a merely

-biological point of view. They are

-markedly so at present, and it would

-be asking too much to expect the tribal

-chiefs of early men to have been wise

-and provident enough to see to it that

-their social institutions were eugenical

-in their effects. We cannot even now

-find such a pitch of wisdom and providence

-in the controllers of our destinies.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak">III</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>The answer to the second question

-is much easier. The human race has

-continued to progress in its culture, in

-its knowledge, in its power over nature,

-because it has devised institutions

-which have created for it a continuous

-social memory that defies death. Now,

-as ever, the wisest and the best must

-die, while their place is taken by babies

-born as ignorant and void of knowledge

-as in the beginning. Only there has

-been invented apparatus which relieves

-the civilized baby of his hereditary

-ignorance, and renders him potentially

-the heir to all the wisdom of the ages.</p>

-

-<p>In the first place, <i>Language</i> not only

-extends enormously the possibilities of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>

-co-operation and common action, but

-also renders possible the consolidation

-of customs and their preservation by

-oral tradition. In the next place,

-<i>Writing</i> enables a society to record all

-that it considers worth remembering.

-Upon these two inventions may be

-reared vast intricate structures, religious,

-political, social, and scientific, which

-knit together and dominate human

-societies from generation to generation,

-and create the conditions for an almost

-mechanical accumulation of knowledge.</p>

-

-<p>Man has thereby become an educable

-creature and fallen a victim to the arts

-of the examiner. Provided the mechanisms

-of education do not get out of

-gear, it is hard to set limits to the

-amounts of knowledge with which he

-can be crammed; but it is clear that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>

-they are far greater than he could

-ever have acquired in a lifetime for

-himself. And as education (of sorts)

-has now become world wide, it might

-seem that the future of knowledge

-was now assured, and no longer liable

-to setbacks such as those due to the

-famous burning of the library of

-Alexandria at the command of the

-Caliph Omar, or the extinction of the

-only Greek scientists who seriously

-concerned themselves with the applications

-of science to life, of Archimedes

-and his School, in the sack of Syracuse.

-At any rate, it seemed clear that progress

-in knowledge could continue

-indefinitely, even in an otherwise

-stationary or decadent society.</p>

-

-<p>Whoever argued thus would fail

-to make sufficient allowance for the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>

-perversity of human nature. Human

-institutions, like the human body, are

-ever tending to get clogged with the

-waste products of their own working.

-Hence, so far from performing the

-functions for which they were intended,

-they are constantly becoming the most

-formidable instruments for their frustration.

-Experience shows how easily

-Churches become the most effective

-deadeners of religious zeal, how often

-Law becomes the negation of justice,

-how deadly is the School to the inborn

-craving for knowledge which seemed

-to Aristotle so characteristic of man’s

-nature.</p>

-

-<p>Accordingly, no one familiar with the

-actual working of academic institutions

-is likely to fall into the error of pinning

-his faith to them. They are, of course,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>

-designed for the purpose of preserving

-and promoting the highest and most

-advanced knowledge hitherto attained:

-but do they anywhere fulfil this purpose?

-Its execution must of necessity

-be left to professors not exempt from

-human frailty, always selected by more

-or less defective methods, whose interests

-by no means coincide with those

-of their subjects. The interest of

-the subject is to become more widely

-understood and so more influential.

-The interest of the professor is to become

-more unassailable, and so more

-authoritative. He achieves this by becoming

-more technical. For the more

-technical he gets, the fewer can comprehend

-him; the fewer are competent to

-criticize him, the more of an oracle

-he becomes; if, therefore, he wishes<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>

-for an easy life of undisturbed academic

-leisure, the more he will indulge his

-natural tendency to grow more technical

-as his knowledge grows, the

-more he will turn away from those

-aspects of his subject which have any

-direct practical or human interest.

-He will wrap himself in mysteries of

-technical jargon, and become as nearly

-as possible unintelligible. Truly, as

-William James once exclaimed to me,

-apropos of the policy of certain philosophers,

-“the natural enemy of any

-subject is the professor thereof!” It

-is clear that if these tendencies are

-allowed to prevail, every subject must

-in course of time become unteachable,

-and not worth learning.</p>

-

-<p>Thus educational systems become

-the chief enemies of education, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>

-seats of learning the chief obstacles

-to the growth of knowledge, while

-in an otherwise stagnant or decadent

-society these tendencies sooner or later

-get the upper hand and utterly corrupt

-the social memory. The power of

-the professor is revealed not so much

-by the things he teaches, as by the

-things he fails or refuses to teach.</p>

-

-<p>History is full of examples. How

-many religions have not perished from

-ritual sclerosis, how many sciences

-have not been degraded into pseudo-sciences

-or games! Logic has been

-just examinable nonsense for over

-two thousand years. The present

-economic chaos in the world has been

-indirectly brought about by the policy

-adopted by the professors of economics

-forty or fifty years ago, to suit their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>

-own convenience. For they then decided

-that they must escape from the

-unwelcome attentions of the public by

-becoming more ‘scientific’; <i>i.e.</i> they

-ceased to express themselves in plain

-language and took to mathematical

-formulae and curves instead; with

-the result that the world promptly

-relapsed into its primitive depths of

-economic ignorance. So soon as the

-professors had retired from it, every

-economic heresy and delusion, which

-had been exposed and uprooted by

-Adam Smith, at once revived and

-flourished. In one generation economics

-disappeared completely from the

-public ken and the political world,

-and the makers of the Peace Treaties

-of 1919 were so incapable of understanding

-an economic argument that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>

-not even the lucid intelligence of

-Mr Keynes could dissuade them from

-enacting the preposterous conditions

-which rendered impossible the realization

-of their aims.<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a> Nor was it so very

-long ago that, in order to save the

-Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge,

-it had to be recast, because it had

-degenerated into an intellectual jig-saw

-puzzle, wholly unrelated to the applications

-of mathematics to the other

-sciences. To avoid jealousies, I hasten

-to add that the University of Oxford,

-which has organized itself as an asylum

-for lost causes, skilfully cultivates,

-by means of its classical and historical<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>

-studies, a backward-looking bias in

-its <i>alumni</i>. The true ‘Greats’ man

-is meant to go down indelibly imbued

-with the conviction that in matters

-of morals and politics nothing of importance

-has been discovered or said

-since Plato and Aristotle, and that nothing

-else matters.</p>

-

-<p>Clearly then we cannot take for

-granted that in any society knowledge

-can progress without limits, nor can

-we count on our academic institutions

-to save us from stagnation and decay,

-even in matters of knowledge. All

-institutions are social mechanisms, and

-all mechanisms need a modicum of

-intelligent supervision, in the absence

-of which they become dangerous engines

-of destruction.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak">IV</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>It appears then that we can extract

-no guarantee of progress either from

-the nature of Man or from the nature

-of human institutions. There is no

-<i>law</i> of progress, if by law be meant

-a superior power able to coerce the

-creatures that are said to ‘obey’ it.

-Neither can we extract from history

-any proof of the superiority of civilized

-man over his uncivilized ancestors.

-Such progress as has been attained

-has been achieved only by the active

-co-operation of the progressive

-organisms: every step has been fought

-for, and progress has ceased whenever<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>

-effort ceased, or was switched off into

-different directions.</p>

-

-<p>Consequently, modern man has no

-right to ‘boast himself far better than

-his fathers’—in intrinsic quality. Intrinsically,

-<i>i.e.</i> apart from the effects

-of culture and social training, it is

-probable that he is slightly <i>inferior</i>

-in capacity to his own ancestors,

-while very markedly inferior to the

-great races of antiquity (like the

-Greeks) in their hey-day. Nor is there

-any reason to suppose that his moral

-nature has changed materially. Modern

-man may be a little tamer and better-tempered,

-because he has been herded

-together much more closely than primitive

-man, and city life, even in slums,

-demands, and produces, a certain

-‘urbanity.’ For many generations<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>

-those who would not pack tight and

-could not stand the strain of constantly

-exhibiting ‘company manners’ and

-accommodating their action to those

-of their fellows, must have fled away

-into the wilds, where they could be

-independent, or have eliminated themselves

-in other ways, <i>e.g.</i> by committing

-murder. It is probable that the social

-history of Iceland, settled as it was

-by unbridled individualists who would

-not brook any form of organized

-government, might throw some light

-on this process of taming the individual.</p>

-

-<p>Nevertheless there is little doubt

-that, in the main, humanity is still

-Yahoo-manity. Alike in mentality

-and in <i>moral</i>, modern man is still substantially

-identical with his palæolithic

-ancestors. He is still the irrational,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>

-impulsive, emotional, foolish, destructive,

-cruel, credulous, creature he

-always was. Normally the Yahoo

-in him is kept under control by the

-constant pressure of a variety of social

-institutions; but let anything upset

-an established social order, and the

-Yahoo comes to the front at once. The

-history of the past fifty years abundantly

-proves that man is still capable

-of atrocities equal to any in his record.

-Not only have we lived through the

-greatest political and the deadliest natural

-convulsion, the Great War and

-the Tokio earthquake, but the Russian

-Revolution has outdone the French

-and Landru the legendary Bluebeard,

-while for mingled atrocity and baseness

-the murders of Rasputin and of Alexander

-of Serbia are unsurpassed in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>

-history. The painful truth is that

-civilization has not improved Man’s

-moral nature. His moral habits are still

-mainly matters of custom, and the

-effect of moral theories is nugatory

-everywhere. Thus civilization is not

-even skin deep; it does not go deeper

-than the clothes.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak">V</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>Clearly it is risky to expose the

-inelastic nature of so stubbornly conservative

-a creature to new conditions

-at a rapid rate. He may not be able

-to adapt himself quickly enough, and

-his old reactions, which did little or

-no harm before, may become extremely

-dangerous. Yet this is just what

-has happened. Science has exposed

-the palæolithic savage masquerading

-in modern garb to a series of physical

-and mental shocks which have endangered

-his equilibrium. It has also enormously

-extended his power and armed

-him with a variety of delicate and

-penetrating instruments which have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>

-often proved edge tools in his hands

-and which the utmost wisdom could

-hardly be trusted to use aright. Under

-these conditions the fighting instinct

-ceases to be an antiquated foible, like

-the hunting instinct, and becomes a

-deadly danger. No wonder the more

-prescient are dismayed at the prospect

-of the old savage passions running

-amok in the full panoply of civilization!</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="VI">VI</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>Nor is this the final item in our tale

-of woe. A third and most sinister fact

-which has to be faced is that Civilization,

-as at present constituted, is very

-definitely a deteriorating agency, conducing

-to the degeneration of mankind.

-This effect of Civilization is nothing

-new, but has been operating, it would

-seem, from the beginning, though not

-probably as intensively as now: its

-discovery, however, is very recent. It

-is quite indirect, unintended, and fortuitous,

-but cumulative, and in the long

-run has probably been a chief cause

-in the decay of States and civilizations,

-as well as an important factor in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>

-arrest of biological development which

-we have had to recognize.</p>

-

-<p>A simple and easily observable sociological

-fact is at the bottom of the

-mischief. The different classes in a

-society have different birth-rates and

-death-rates, and the differences between

-these yield their several net

-rates of increase or decrease. Now,

-whereas under the conditions of savage

-life class differences can hardly exist,

-or, at least cannot be accentuated, so

-that the whole tribe flourishes or

-perishes together, and among barbarians

-the upper classes have a very

-great advantage and the tribe recruits

-itself chiefly from the children of the

-chiefs, because the conditions of life

-are so severe that the lower classes

-are not able to rear many children; in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>

-civilized societies these conditions are

-reversed. It is found that though both

-birth-rates and death-rates grow as we

-descend the social scale, so does the net

-rate of increase. Indeed, the highest or

-ruling class nowhere appears to keep

-up its numbers without considerable

-recruitment from below. So society, as

-at present organized, is always dying

-off at the top, and proliferating at the

-bottom, of the social pyramid.</p>

-

-<p>The disastrous consequences of this

-sort of social organization may easily be

-apprehended, with a little reflection.

-(1) All societies, even those whose

-social structure is most rigid, have need

-of ability, discover it, and reward it by

-social promotion. But (2) as this promotion

-means passing into a class with

-a relatively inadequate rate of reproduction,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>

-the biological penalty attaching

-to social promotion is racial

-extinction. Thus (3) the ultimate

-reward of merit is sterilization, and

-society appears to be an organization

-devoted to the suicidal task of extirpating

-any ability it may chance to

-contain, by draining it away from any

-stratum in which it may occur, promoting

-it into the highest, and there

-destroying it. It is exactly as though

-a dairyman should set in motion

-apparatus for separating the cream

-from the milk, and then, as it rose,

-skim it off, and throw it away!</p>

-

-<p>At present it is calculated that the

-highest classes in the chief civilized

-societies only reproduce themselves to

-the extent of fifty per cent. of their

-number in each generation, so that the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>

-hereditary ability of half of them is

-lost in each generation. But even then

-the remainder is largely wasted. It is

-churned into froth and scum by social

-forces. For neither now nor at any

-time has social intelligence shown itself

-equal to devising a training for the

-youth of the highest classes that would

-provide them with adequate stimuli

-to develop their faculties, and to lead

-a strenuous life of social service. The

-children of the rich are tempted to live

-for ‘society’ in the narrower sense,

-which means frittering away one’s life

-on a round of vacuous amusement; and

-they rarely resist the temptation.</p>

-

-<p>Naturally it is difficult to trace the

-accumulation of ability in the upper

-social strata which is theoretically to

-be expected. On the other hand, in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>

-some subjects at any rate, the symptoms

-of a world-wide dearth of ability

-are becoming unmistakable. The Great

-War, though it made abundantly manifest

-the prevalence of incompetents in

-high places, did not reveal the existence

-either of a great general or of a great

-statesman anywhere.</p>

-

-<p>It is superfluous to insist either on

-the fatuity of a social organization such

-as this, or on the certainty of racial

-degeneration which it entails: but it

-may be well to draw attention to the

-<i>rapidity</i> with which these degenerative

-processes are at present sapping the

-vitality and value of our civilized races.

-The failure to reproduce does not, as

-in former times, affect merely the

-aristocracy in the highest social strata;

-it has spread to the whole of the professional<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>

-and middle classes, and to

-most classes of skilled labour. It is not

-too much to say that, with the exception

-of the miners, none of the desirable

-elements in the nation are doing their

-bit to keep up the population, and that

-its continued growth is mainly due to

-the unrestrained breeding of the casual

-labourers and the feeble-minded.</p>

-

-<p>In the rest of the population its

-increase is checked by birth-control

-and the postponement of marriage,

-neither of which affects the undesirables.

-They are too stupid, reckless,

-and ignorant to practise the former, and

-have nothing to gain by the latter.

-Also, to make it quite certain that they

-shall form a true ‘proletariate,’ the

-wisdom of our rulers ordains that a

-knowledge of birth-control shall be a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>

-(fatal) privilege reserved for the intelligent

-and well-to-do. They instruct

-the police to prevent it from penetrating

-to the poor and stupid—apparently

-from the mistaken idea that the State

-needs plenty of cheap labour and cheap

-cannon-fodder. So child-bearing remains

-compulsory for the wretched

-women of the poor, whereas elsewhere

-only those women produce children

-who desire them, and natural selection

-is thus allowed gradually to eliminate

-the temperament of the unwilling (and,

-therefore, probably less competent)

-mother.</p>

-

-<p>The dysgenic effects of this class-discrimination

-are further intensified

-by other tendencies: (1) The advance

-of medicine and hygiene has enormously

-diminished selective mortality in all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>

-classes, and improved the chances of

-weaklings to survive and leave descendants.

-(2) The advance of philanthropy

-preserves them, especially in

-the lower classes, where formerly the

-mortality was largely selective and a

-high death-rate both counteracted an

-excessive birth-rate and increased the

-value of the survivors. The emotional

-appeal of ‘baby-saving’ goes so

-directly to the heart of civilized man

-that his head never reflects whether the

-particular baby is worth saving, and

-whether a baby from a different breed

-and with a better pedigree would not

-be better worth having. (3) Modern

-obstetrics save the lives of thousands

-of women, whose physique is such that

-in former times they would inevitably

-have died in child-birth. The result is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>

-that child-birth is becoming more difficult.

-Also babies brought up on the

-bottle, which has an irresistible attraction

-for microbes of all sorts, are apt to

-be less healthy than those nourished in

-the more primitive manner.</p>

-

-<p>(4) Lastly, the bastardizing, which

-used formerly to provide for a considerable

-infusion of the blood of

-the upper classes into the lower, has

-now practically ceased. Since the

-merry days of King Charles II, very

-few noble families of royal descent have

-been added to the peerage.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak">VII</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>Our civilization, therefore, carries

-within it the seeds of its own decay and

-destruction, and it does not require high

-prophetic gifts to predict the future of

-a race which goes the way marked out

-for it by such perversely suicidal institutions.

-It cannot improve, but must

-degenerate, and the only question

-would seem to be whether the decadence

-of Man will leave him viable as

-a biological species. At present it

-looks very much as though his blind

-leaders would lead their blinder followers

-from catastrophe to catastrophe,

-through imperialist world-wars to class-wars

-and to race-wars: but even if, by

-some miraculous rally of human intelligence,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>

-these convulsions should be

-averted, the prospect will not really be

-improved. The violent destruction of

-the human race by war will only be

-more <i>dramatic</i>: it will not be more

-<i>fatal</i> than its gradual decay as its arts

-and sciences slowly fossilize, or peter

-out, in an overwhelming flood of feeble-mindedness.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak">VIII</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>This is the one alternative. We shall

-get to it, if we go on as we are going:

-but it is not our doom. The alternative

-is to exercise the danger by an adequate

-reform of human nature and of human

-institutions. This again seems attainable

-in at least two ways.</p>

-

-<p>The first, and more paradoxical, of

-these would make a direct frontal

-attack on the palæolithic Yahoo, and

-try to bring about his moral reformation.

-The means for this purpose are

-ready to hand. Christian ethics have

-been in being, as a moral theory, for

-nearly two thousand years. If the

-Yahoo could be really christianized, he

-would at any rate cease to cut his own<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>

-throat in cutting his neighbour’s. And

-it is astonishing how much scientific

-support is forthcoming for the paradoxes

-of Christian ethics. It is an

-historical fact that the meek have a

-knack of inheriting the earth after

-their lords and masters have killed

-each other off, and that passive resistance

-wears out the greatest violence,

-and conscientious objection defeats the

-craftiest opportunism, if only you can

-get enough of them. It is a biological

-fact that the rabbit survives better

-than the tiger; and the same would

-appear to be true of the human ‘rabbit’

-and the Nietzschean ‘wild beast.’

-Intrinsically, therefore, Christian ethics

-might be well worth trying.</p>

-

-<p>I wish I could believe it likely that this

-policy will be tried. But the palæolithic<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>

-Yahoo has been dosed with Christian

-ethics for two thousand years, and they

-have never either impressed or improved

-him. Their paradoxes give him

-a moral shock, and he has not brains

-enough to grasp their rationality. He

-will exclaim rather with the gallant

-admiral in the House of Commons,

-when justly indignant at the unheard-of

-notion that a ‘moral gesture’ of a

-Labour Government might be the best

-policy, “Good God, sir, if we are to

-rely for our air security on the Sermon

-on the Mount, all I can say is, ‘<i>God

-help us!</i>’” Besides, the proposal to

-put Christian principles into practice

-would be bitterly opposed by all the

-Churches in Christendom.<a id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[B]</a></p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>It may be more prudent, therefore,

-to try a safer though slower way, that

-of the eugenical reform and reconstruction

-of our social organization.

-As to the possibilities in this direction,

-I incline to be much more hopeful than

-either Mr Haldane or Mr Russell.

-Mr Haldane despises eugenics, because

-he is looking for the more spectacular

-advent of the ‘ectogenetic baby,’ to be

-the Saviour of mankind. But he might

-not arrive, or be seriously delayed in

-transmission, or fail to come up to

-Mr Haldane’s expectations; and, meanwhile,

-we cannot afford to wait.</p>

-

-<p>Mr Russell distrusts eugenics, because

-he fears that any eugenical scheme

-put into practice will be ‘nobbled’ by

-our present ruling rings, and perverted

-into an instrument to consolidate their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>

-power. He thinks that dissent from

-dominant beliefs and institutions will

-be taken as proof of imbecility, and

-sterilized accordingly,<a id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[C]</a> and that the

-result would merely be to spread over

-all the world the hopeless uniformity

-and commonplaceness of the ideals and

-practice of the American business man,

-as depicted by Mr Sinclair Lewis.</p>

-

-<p>This prognostication would be very

-plausible, if we supposed eugenics to be

-introduced into the social structure

-from above, privily, and in small doses,

-and by way of administrative order, as

-under the existing Acts to check the

-spread of feeble-mindedness.</p>

-

-<p>But this method would be impracticable.

-It would not generate anything

-like the social momentum necessary to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>

-carry through any radical reform. To

-make it effective, it would have to be

-backed by a powerful, enthusiastic,

-and intelligent public sentiment. This

-presupposes that the public has been

-biologically educated to appreciate the

-actual situation, and has been thoroughly

-wrought up about the fatuity of our

-social order, and understands what is

-wrong with it. If it understands that

-much, it can also be made to see that it

-is fantastic to expect to leap to the

-Ideal State by a social revolution.

-No one now knows what the institutions

-of an Ideal State would be like,

-nor how they would work. We only

-know that they will have to be evolved

-out of our present institutions, even

-as the Superman has to be evolved

-out of the primitive Yahoo. In either<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>

-case, the process will be gradual, and

-its success will depend upon details, on

-taking one step after another at the

-right rate in the right direction, making

-a new adjustment here, overcoming

-an old difficulty there, removing obstacles,

-smoothing over the shell-holes

-and scars dating from Man’s lurid

-past, and, in general, feeling one’s way

-systematically and scientifically to

-better things. Such a mode of progression

-may seem unheroic, but it

-has the great advantage that it is

-unlikely to go irretrievably wrong.

-If we know from the outset that we

-are tentatively feeling our way, we shall

-always be on the look out for traps

-and possibilities of going astray, trying

-out the value of our policies by their

-results, and willing to retrace our<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>

-steps when we have made a false one.</p>

-

-<p>The social temper, therefore, will

-become far more intelligent and reasonable

-than it has been hitherto. It

-will be slow to dogmatize, and will

-regard the <i>toleration</i> of differences

-of opinion as among the cardinal

-principles of a sanely progressive social

-order. For as we can no longer assume,

-with Plato and the other Utopians,

-that <i>perfection</i> may be postulated,

-provision has always to be made for

-the <i>improvement</i> of the social order.

-It can never be accepted as absolutely

-good, but must always be regarded as

-capable, in principle, of being bettered.

-Even the best of established institutions

-are only good relatively to the

-alternatives to which they showed

-themselves superior: under changed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>

-conditions they may become inferior,

-and may fail us, or ruin us, if we do

-not make haste to transform them into

-something better fitted to the new

-conditions. Hence the social order must

-be <i>plastic</i>, and must never be allowed

-to grow rigid. There must always

-be room in it for experiments that

-have a reasonable prospect of turning

-out to be improvements. For progress

-will depend on the timely adoption

-of such novelties.</p>

-

-<p>But society has no means of commanding

-them at will. It has to wait

-till they occur to some one. As biological

-variations have to arise

-spontaneously before they can be

-selected, so valuable new ideas have

-to occur in a human mind before they

-can be tried and approved. Society<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>

-cannot originate discoveries, it can

-only refrain from so organizing itself

-as to stamp them out when they occur.

-It is vitally necessary, therefore, that

-we should beware of suppressing variations,

-whether of thought or of bodily

-endowment, that may prove to be

-valuable.</p>

-

-<p>Also, of course, we shall have to

-realize that our whole procedure is

-<i>essentially experimental</i>, and all that

-this implies. We do not know, at the

-outset, what would be the best obtainable

-type, either of man or of society;

-true, but we mean to find out. Nor

-is it unreasonable to expect to do so

-as we go along. We start with a

-pretty shrewd suspicion that certain

-types, say the feeble-minded, the sickly,

-the insane, are undesirable, and that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>

-no good can come of coddling and cultivating

-them: we similarly are pretty

-sure that certain other types, say the intelligent,

-healthy, and energetic, are inherently

-superior to the former. We

-try, therefore, to improve and increase

-the better types. How precisely, and

-how most effectively we do not quite

-know, though we can make pretty good

-preliminary guesses. So we try. That

-will entail experimentation in a variety

-of directions, with ‘control experiments,’

-and a modicum of mistakes.

-But our mistakes will not be fatal, because

-if we advance tentatively and

-with intelligent apprehension, we shall

-realize them in time, and shall not feel

-bound to persist in any course that

-yields unsatisfactory results.</p>

-

-<p>It is really one of the great advantages<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>

-of eugenics that it cannot proceed

-upon any cut-and-dried scheme, but

-will have to be guided by the results

-of experiment and the fruits of experience,

-each of which will be followed

-and discussed by an intensely interested

-public. For the difficulties of

-eugenics are all difficulties of detail,

-and intelligent attention to detail

-may overcome them all. Thus the

-dysgenical working of civilized society,

-which has come about unintentionally

-through the unfortunate convergence

-of a number of tendencies, may be

-altered similarly, by changing the

-incidence of social forces.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak">IX</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>If scientific eugenics can put a stop

-to the contra-selection incidental to

-civilization, Man will recover the plasticity

-and the progressiveness he once

-possessed, and will be able to evolve

-further—in whatever direction seems

-to him best. We need not take alarm

-at this possibility, for with his superior

-knowledge he may surely be trusted to

-make a better job of his evolution

-than the <i>Lemur</i> and the <i>Pithecanthropus</i>,

-who were our progenitors and

-managed to evolve into modern man.</p>

-

-<p>But the process will necessarily be a

-slow one, even though a comprehensive

-scheme of eugenics will be providing

-simultaneously <i>two</i> sources of improvement,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>

-by the elimination of defectives

-at the bottom of the social scale, and

-by the increase of ability at the top.

-As, moreover, time presses, and sheer

-destruction may overtake us before

-eugenics have made much difference,

-it would be highly desirable if some

-means could be found to accelerate the

-change of heart required. For this

-purpose, I am much less inclined to put

-my trust in the advance of pharmacology

-than Mr Haldane and Mr

-Russell.<a id="FNanchor_4" href="#Footnote_4" class="fnanchor">[D]</a> Hitherto new drugs have

-only meant new vices, sometimes (like

-cocaine) of so fascinating a character

-as to distract the whole police force

-from their proper function of repressing

-crime. So it seems legitimate to be

-very sceptical about moral transformation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>

-scenes to be wrought by pills and

-injections.</p>

-

-<p>On the other hand there does seem

-to be a science from the possible progress

-of which something of a sensational

-kind might not unreasonably

-be expected. It is, moreover, the

-science most directly concerned with

-affairs of this sort. Psychology, the

-science of human mentality, is, by

-common consent, in a deplorably backward

-state. It has remained a ground

-for metaphysical excursions and a

-playground for the arbitrary pedantries

-of classificatory systematists. Its

-efforts to become scientific have only

-led it to ape assumptions and to borrow

-notions found to be appropriate in

-sciences with widely different problems

-and objects. The results, as the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>

-psychologists themselves confess, are

-meagre and disappointing; which, of

-course, only proves that the borrowed

-notions are inappropriate and incapable

-of making Psychology into an effective

-science. But if psychologists should

-take it into their heads to settle down

-to business, to recognize the primary

-obligation of every science to develop

-methods and conceptions capable of

-working upon its subject-matter,

-and so tried to authenticate their

-‘truth’ after the ordinary fashion of

-the other sciences, namely by the

-pragmatic test of successful working,

-some surprising effects might be elicited

-even from the actual human mind.</p>

-

-<p>For there is reason to suppose that

-its present organization is very far

-from being the best of which it is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>

-capable. It has come about in a very

-haphazard manner, and we are not at

-present making anything like an

-adequate use of all our powers. Hence

-by changing the gearing and re-arranging

-the traditional coupling, so to speak,

-of our faculties, improvements might

-conceivably be wrought which would

-seem to us to border on the miraculous.

-Thus a pragmatically efficient

-Psychology might actually invert the

-miracle of Circe, and really transform

-the Yahoo into a man.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak">X</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>I have endeavoured in this very

-summary sketch to show that the

-doom of Tantalus is by no means

-unconditional, and that he can save

-himself if he chooses, and that by no

-superhuman effort, but merely by

-recognizing facts that are right before

-his nose and well within his comprehension,

-and by a little clear thinking

-upon their import. But I would not

-presume to predict that he <i>will</i> save

-himself: history affords no unambiguous

-guide. It seems to show

-that something worse and something

-better than what actually happens is

-always conceivable, and that neither

-our hopes nor our fears are ever fully<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>

-realized. If so, poor Tantalus, hoping

-against hope, fearing against reason,

-may muddle along for a good while

-yet, without repeating either his ancient

-error of imagining that he could sup

-with the gods, or his modern folly of

-using his reason, as Goethe’s Mephistopheles

-declared, only to become more

-bestial than any beast!</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p class="ph1">FOOTNOTES:</p>

-</div>

-

-<div class="footnote">

-

-<p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[A]</a> The most absurd perhaps was the clause,

-appearing in all the Peace Treaties, which made

-‘reparations’ a first charge on all the assets of

-the defeated countries. This, of course, completely

-destroyed their credit, and incapacitated

-them from raising a loan, forcing them to have

-recourse to progressive inflation, and so into

-bankruptcy.</p>

-

-</div>

-

-<div class="footnote">

-

-<p><a id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="label">[B]</a> This does <i>not</i> mean, of course, that there are

-no Christians in the Churches, but only that they

-are not in control of these institutions.</p>

-

-</div>

-

-<div class="footnote">

-

-<p><a id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="label">[C]</a> <i>Icarus</i>, p. 49.</p>

-

-</div>

-

-<div class="footnote">

-

-<p><a id="Footnote_4" href="#FNanchor_4" class="label">[D]</a> cf. <i>Daedalus</i>, p. 34; <i>Icarus</i>, p. 54.</p>

-

-</div>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<div class="transnote">

-<p class="ph1">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:</p>

-

-<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.</p>

-

-</div></div>

-

-<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TANTALUS ***</div>

-</body>

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+      Tantalus | Project Gutenberg
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+</head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TANTALUS ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter hide"><img src="images/coversmall.jpg" width="450" alt="cover"></div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1>TANTALUS</h1>
+
+<p class="ph2">OR<br>
+
+THE FUTURE OF MAN</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="bbox">
+
+<p class="ph3">TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW<br>
+SERIES</p>
+
+<hr class="full">
+
+<p>DAEDALUS, or Science and the Future<br>
+<span class="indent"><i>By J. B. S. Haldane</i></span></p>
+
+<p>ICARUS, or The Future of Science<br>
+<span class="indent"><i>By Bertrand Russell, F. R. S.</i></span></p>
+
+<p>THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST<br>
+<span class="indent"><i>By F. G. Crookshank, M.D.</i></span></p>
+
+<p>WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES<br>
+<span class="indent"><i>By Prof. A. M. Low</i></span></p>
+
+<p>NARCISSUS, or The Anatomy of Clothes<br>
+<span class="indent"><i>By Gerald Heard</i></span></p>
+
+<p>TANTALUS, or The Future of Man<br>
+<span class="indent"><i>By F. C. S. Schiller</i></span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">In Preparation</span></p>
+
+<p>THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS<br>
+<span class="indent"><i>By Professor Patten</i></span></p>
+
+<p>WOMAN AND THE FUTURE<br>
+<span class="indent"><i>By Anthony M. Ludovici</i></span></p>
+
+<hr class="full">
+
+<p class="ph1">E. P. DUTTON &amp; COMPANY</p>
+</div></div></div></div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_title.jpg" alt="title page"></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="titlepage">
+<p><span class="xxlarge">TANTALUS</span><br>
+
+<span class="large">OR</span><br>
+
+<span class="xxlarge">The Future of Man</span></p>
+
+<p>BY<br>
+
+<span class="large">F. C. S. SCHILLER</span><br>
+
+<i>M.A., D.Sc.; Fellow and Tutor of<br>
+Corpus Christi College, Oxford</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_titlelogo.jpg" alt="publisher's logo"></div>
+
+<p><i>Man never is, but always to be, blest</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">New York</span><br>
+<span class="large">E. P. DUTTON &amp; COMPANY</span><br>
+<span class="smcap">681 Fifth Avenue</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center">Copyright 1924<br>
+By <span class="smcap">E. P. Dutton</span> &amp; <span class="smcap">Company</span><br>
+<br>
+<i>All Rights Reserved</i><br>
+<br>
+<i>First Printing, November, 1924<br>
+Second Printing, March, 1925</i><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Printed in the United States of America</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">[v]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">PREFACE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>I rather anticipate that superficial
+critics who do not like the argument of
+this essay will accuse it of pessimism, a
+charge which perhaps means little more
+than that they do not like it. Nevertheless,
+it may be worth while to point out,
+(1) that pessimism is not a logical objection
+to a contention of which the
+truth cannot otherwise be questioned,
+and (2) that though the argument of
+<i>Tantalus</i> may be said generally to corroborate
+that of <i>Daedalus</i> and <i>Icarus</i>,
+yet its conclusion is much less pessimistic
+than theirs, because (3) it makes it
+very plain that the evils which threaten
+the future of mankind are in no case<span class="pagenum" id="Page_vi">[vi]</span>
+unavoidable. If it is called ‘pessimism’
+to point out the methods by which men
+may escape destruction, because men do
+not care to adopt them, I suppose it
+must be ‘optimism’ to rush violently
+and open-eyed down a precipice, and to
+expect to be saved by a miracle. Certainly
+such would appear to be the belief
+upon which human affairs are at
+present conducted.</p>
+
+<p class="right">F.C.S.S.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p class="ph2">TANTALUS</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span>
+<p class="ph2">TANTALUS</p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">PROLOGUE: THE ORACLE<br>
+OF THE DEAD</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>When I read in Mr Haldane’s <i>Daedalus</i>
+the wonderful things that Science
+was going to do for us, and in Mr Russell’s
+<i>Icarus</i> how easily both we and it
+might come to grief in consequence, it at
+once became plain to me that of all the
+heroes of antiquity Tantalus would be
+the one best fitted to prognosticate the
+probable future of Man. For, if we
+interpret the history of Daedalus as
+meaning the collapse of Minoan civilization
+under the strain imposed on its<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span>
+moral fibre by material progress, and
+the fate of Icarus as meaning man’s
+inability to use the powers of the air
+without crashing, one could gauge the
+probability that history would repeat
+itself still further, and that man would
+once more allow his vices to cheat him
+of the happiness that seemed so clearly
+within his reach.</p>
+
+<p>I determined, however, to confirm
+this intelligent forecast by consulting
+Tantalus himself. To consult the oracle
+of a dead hero, it was, I knew, only
+necessary to undergo the process of
+‘incubation,’ a sort of camping out on
+his tomb, in the skin of a sacrificial
+beast; and fortunately the tomb of
+Tantalus had just been discovered in
+Phrygia by the archæologists of the
+British School at Athens.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span>I set out, therefore, with great
+promptitude, and in due course, arrived
+at the ruins of the tomb of Tantalus.
+They did not much resemble a first-class
+hotel, and, of course, my idea of
+an ‘incubation’ was well laughed at,
+but I managed to find a pretty level
+corner, more or less sheltered from the
+wind. Here I wrapped myself up in my
+excellent rug, having decided to dispense
+with the more correct method of
+ensconcing myself in the gory hide of a
+sacrificial ox. The night was fine,
+though cold, and fortunately there were
+no mosquitoes, nor any of the other
+insects one would inevitably have encountered
+in the dwellings of the living.
+But the ground was very, very, hard,
+and I tossed about for hours, regretting
+my classical education and the psychical<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>
+researcher’s rashness in trying foolish
+experiments.</p>
+
+<p>At last I fell asleep, at least I suppose
+so. I also fell a great deal further. I
+seemed to go right through my rocky
+bed, and to fall down, down, down,
+interminably, through a sort of elastic
+space. When at last the not wholly
+unpleasant motion stopped, I found
+myself in a vast, grey, sandy plain,
+illuminated by a cold grey light as
+though of dawn. The only thing to
+catch the eye was a small round
+hummock, not very far from me. On
+it grew a mighty tree, with dark green
+pointed leaves and drooping branches,
+surrounded by a gleaming white fence
+or paling. I naturally walked towards
+it.</p>
+
+<p>As I got near, I noticed that the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>
+white paling, which completely enclosed
+the hummock, was composed of <i>bones</i>,
+or rather of every imaginable sort of
+spine, tooth and sting, garnished with
+the saws and swords of sawfish and
+swordfish, and all knit together into an
+impenetrable <i>cheval de frise</i> that prevented
+approach to the foot of the tree.
+The soil all round this strange hedge
+had apparently been trodden into deep
+mud by some creature that had walked
+round and round the tree, and the
+water required for its manufacture was
+supplied by a small spring which rose
+within the enclosure and flowed out
+through its interstices.</p>
+
+<p>As I walked round the tree to the
+further side of the hummock, I came
+upon an extraordinary sight. I beheld
+a naked man trying to reach some of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>
+the fruit that dangled down from the
+outer branches of the tree but appeared
+to be just out of his reach, and so intent
+upon his design that he did not notice
+my approach. He seemed a tall man,
+and the upper part of his body was well
+formed. His features were good and
+regular, though somewhat hard, and
+not intellectual; his resolute jaw
+bespoke the man of action, accustomed
+to command and to be obeyed. So
+far, his appearance would have done
+credit to any modern captain of industry.
+But the lower half of his body
+appeared to be misshapen. His thighs
+were so curved that he could not walk
+upright, but had to stoop and lean
+forward as he slowly shambled along.
+Still more monstrous seemed the feet,
+with which he churned up the mud<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>
+around the fence; they were enormous
+and hardly seemed human in their
+shape, though they were too deeply
+plunged in the mud to permit one to
+see what exactly was wrong with them.</p>
+
+<p>This strange being, whom the bold
+intuition of the dream-consciousness
+at once identified with Tantalus, was
+evidently trying to grasp the fruit that
+hung from the lower branches of the
+tree. For a while his efforts were vain,
+but then a gust of wind brought within
+his reach a large conical shining red
+fruit he had long coveted. It was one
+of the strange features of the tree that
+it was covered with fruit, and higher
+up also with flowers, of the most
+various sizes, shapes, and colours. He
+seized it triumphantly; but the effect
+was surprising. For he had hardly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>
+touched it when it exploded, and
+covered him from head to foot with
+its blood-red juice. He at once sank
+senseless to the ground. But, after a
+while, he slowly recovered, and recommenced
+his old game. This time, he
+attacked a large round yellowish fruit;
+but when he succeeded in seizing it,
+it too exploded, and poured out upon
+him volumes of a heavy yellow-green
+vapour. Again he collapsed, and this
+time his stupor lasted longer.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he began to stir again
+I had, I thought, grasped the situation,
+and determined to intervene. So I
+drew near, and addressed him: “Can
+I be mistaken in thinking that I see
+before me the far-famed hero, Tantalus,
+boon companion of the gods?” “And
+their victim.” “And what tree is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>
+this, I pray you, about which you busy
+yourself?” “The Tree of Knowledge.”
+“And the water, which you have
+trampled into mud, is what?” “The
+Elixir of Life.” “Then you seem to
+have all the materials for a happy life.
+Why don’t you eat of the fruits of the
+tree, and drink of the elixir?” “You
+have seen the results of my efforts.”
+“I cannot but think you have been unfortunate
+in your choice of the fruits:
+there are many that look much better
+higher up.” “And how am I to get
+at them?” “Well, of course, you
+must break through all these <i>debris</i> of
+former animal life, which bar your
+access to the trunk of the tree, and
+prevent you from drinking of the
+water of life; after that, you can climb
+up the tree, and pick the best of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>
+fruits.” “And how am I to break
+through the barrier of bones?” “Even
+though you appear to have no instruments,
+you can surely find a stone?”
+“Where shall I find a stone in the Plain
+of Forgetfulness? And besides, how
+should I climb the tree with these
+... feet?” And he lifted up one
+of his monstrous limbs. “Certainly
+you seem to be pretty badly earth-bound,”
+said I, “but I will try to find
+you some stones.”</p>
+
+<p>So off I set. I had not got far when
+a fierce blast struck me and peppered
+me with sand. I struggled stoutly
+against it, but was nearly choked. And
+then, suddenly, I awoke to find that day
+was dawning and that the wind had
+gone round to the north, and was blowing
+in my face. But I was well satisfied<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>
+with my experiment. The interpretation
+of the response I had obtained
+from Tantalus was too plain to need
+the aid of a psycho-analyst.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">I</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Our best prophets are growing very
+anxious about our future. They are
+afraid we are getting to know too
+much, and are likely to use our knowledge
+to commit suicide, or rather,
+mutual murder, after the fashion of
+the Kilkenny cats.</p>
+
+<p>To these dismal forecasts it is reasonable
+to reply that there is nothing novel
+in the present situation. The human
+race has always known enough to
+wreck itself, and its abounding folly
+has always inspired its wise men with
+the gravest apprehension for its future.
+Yet, either by chance or providence,
+it has always known also how to avoid
+destruction. It has never known
+enough to make itself happy; nor<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>
+does it know enough to do so now. Its
+future has always been precarious,
+because it has always been uncertain
+whether it would use its knowledge
+well or ill, to improve or to ruin itself.
+It has always had a choice between
+alternative policies, and it has so now.</p>
+
+<p>What sense then is there in making
+such a fuss about the present crisis?
+It is a particularly plain case of the
+perennial choice of Hercules. What is
+needed is just a little clear thinking and
+plain speaking to a society more than
+usually debauched by a long regime of
+flattery, propaganda, and subterfuge.
+Mankind <i>can</i> make a fool of itself, as
+it always could; if it does, its blood
+will be on its own head. For it has
+knowledge enough to avoid the dangers
+that threaten it, if it will use its
+knowledge properly.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">II</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>The first fact to be enunciated
+plainly, and faced, until it grows
+familiar, and its import is appreciated,
+is that, biologically speaking, Man has
+ceased to be a progressive species long
+ago. The evolutionary impetus which
+carried our ancestors from the level
+of the ape or even of the lemur, through
+such subhuman types as <i>Pithecanthropus</i>,
+and the Heidelberg and Neanderthal
+men, to ‘modern’ man, seems
+to have spent itself by the middle of
+the palæolithic period, <i>i.e.</i> say, thirty
+thousand years ago. At any rate, the
+Cro-Magnon people of the Aurignacian
+age, who then appeared upon the scene,
+were in no wise inferior to any subsequent
+race of men, either in stature or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>
+in brain capacity. They average six
+feet three inches in height, with one-sixth
+more brains than the modern
+European. So far indeed as their
+physical remains can indicate, they
+seem to have been very definitely the
+finest race of human beings that has
+ever existed. If we have improved on
+them, it has probably been only in
+such minor matters as resistance to the
+microbes of the many diseases which
+flourish among dense populations under
+slum conditions. Against that probability
+have to be set such certainties
+as that our toes and many of our
+muscles are being atrophied and that
+we are getting more liable to caries and
+baldness.</p>
+
+<p>This remarkable fact of the arrest
+of his biological development is certainly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>
+the greatest mystery in the history
+of Man. It at once raises two further
+questions: In the first place, how did
+it happen, and what caused it? And,
+secondly, what has enabled man, nevertheless,
+to progress in other respects,
+in knowledge, in power, and in culture?</p>
+
+<p>To answer the first question we
+cannot do better than argue back from
+what is now the most salient feature
+about man’s biological position, namely
+that his survival is determined far more
+by his relations to the social group
+to which he belongs than by personal
+efficiency: hence he can draw on the
+collective resources of his tribe, and,
+to a growing extent, gets emancipated
+from the control of natural selection.
+Thus social selection and the survival
+of societies profoundly modify (and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>
+often defeat), the working of natural
+selection. The advantages are obvious;
+it is no longer essential for a member of
+a society that collectively controls the
+conditions of existence to develop any
+high degree of personal capacity, in
+order to survive. A single wise and
+provident minister, like Joseph, is
+enough to keep alive millions of
+Pharaoh’s subjects through the lean
+years of famine. But the inferior and
+incompetent survive with the rest.</p>
+
+<p>Now, if we suppose that by mid-palæolithic
+times man had established
+his ascendency over nature and perfected
+his social organization sufficiently
+to render these services to his fellows,
+we have suggested a possible cause of
+the cessation of biological progress.
+For social influences are as likely as not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>
+to be ‘contra-selective,’ that is, to tend
+to preserve by preference the stocks
+which are less viable from a merely
+biological point of view. They are
+markedly so at present, and it would
+be asking too much to expect the tribal
+chiefs of early men to have been wise
+and provident enough to see to it that
+their social institutions were eugenical
+in their effects. We cannot even now
+find such a pitch of wisdom and providence
+in the controllers of our destinies.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">III</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>The answer to the second question
+is much easier. The human race has
+continued to progress in its culture, in
+its knowledge, in its power over nature,
+because it has devised institutions
+which have created for it a continuous
+social memory that defies death. Now,
+as ever, the wisest and the best must
+die, while their place is taken by babies
+born as ignorant and void of knowledge
+as in the beginning. Only there has
+been invented apparatus which relieves
+the civilized baby of his hereditary
+ignorance, and renders him potentially
+the heir to all the wisdom of the ages.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, <i>Language</i> not only
+extends enormously the possibilities of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>
+co-operation and common action, but
+also renders possible the consolidation
+of customs and their preservation by
+oral tradition. In the next place,
+<i>Writing</i> enables a society to record all
+that it considers worth remembering.
+Upon these two inventions may be
+reared vast intricate structures, religious,
+political, social, and scientific, which
+knit together and dominate human
+societies from generation to generation,
+and create the conditions for an almost
+mechanical accumulation of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Man has thereby become an educable
+creature and fallen a victim to the arts
+of the examiner. Provided the mechanisms
+of education do not get out of
+gear, it is hard to set limits to the
+amounts of knowledge with which he
+can be crammed; but it is clear that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>
+they are far greater than he could
+ever have acquired in a lifetime for
+himself. And as education (of sorts)
+has now become world wide, it might
+seem that the future of knowledge
+was now assured, and no longer liable
+to setbacks such as those due to the
+famous burning of the library of
+Alexandria at the command of the
+Caliph Omar, or the extinction of the
+only Greek scientists who seriously
+concerned themselves with the applications
+of science to life, of Archimedes
+and his School, in the sack of Syracuse.
+At any rate, it seemed clear that progress
+in knowledge could continue
+indefinitely, even in an otherwise
+stationary or decadent society.</p>
+
+<p>Whoever argued thus would fail
+to make sufficient allowance for the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>
+perversity of human nature. Human
+institutions, like the human body, are
+ever tending to get clogged with the
+waste products of their own working.
+Hence, so far from performing the
+functions for which they were intended,
+they are constantly becoming the most
+formidable instruments for their frustration.
+Experience shows how easily
+Churches become the most effective
+deadeners of religious zeal, how often
+Law becomes the negation of justice,
+how deadly is the School to the inborn
+craving for knowledge which seemed
+to Aristotle so characteristic of man’s
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, no one familiar with the
+actual working of academic institutions
+is likely to fall into the error of pinning
+his faith to them. They are, of course,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>
+designed for the purpose of preserving
+and promoting the highest and most
+advanced knowledge hitherto attained:
+but do they anywhere fulfil this purpose?
+Its execution must of necessity
+be left to professors not exempt from
+human frailty, always selected by more
+or less defective methods, whose interests
+by no means coincide with those
+of their subjects. The interest of
+the subject is to become more widely
+understood and so more influential.
+The interest of the professor is to become
+more unassailable, and so more
+authoritative. He achieves this by becoming
+more technical. For the more
+technical he gets, the fewer can comprehend
+him; the fewer are competent to
+criticize him, the more of an oracle
+he becomes; if, therefore, he wishes<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>
+for an easy life of undisturbed academic
+leisure, the more he will indulge his
+natural tendency to grow more technical
+as his knowledge grows, the
+more he will turn away from those
+aspects of his subject which have any
+direct practical or human interest.
+He will wrap himself in mysteries of
+technical jargon, and become as nearly
+as possible unintelligible. Truly, as
+William James once exclaimed to me,
+apropos of the policy of certain philosophers,
+“the natural enemy of any
+subject is the professor thereof!” It
+is clear that if these tendencies are
+allowed to prevail, every subject must
+in course of time become unteachable,
+and not worth learning.</p>
+
+<p>Thus educational systems become
+the chief enemies of education, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>
+seats of learning the chief obstacles
+to the growth of knowledge, while
+in an otherwise stagnant or decadent
+society these tendencies sooner or later
+get the upper hand and utterly corrupt
+the social memory. The power of
+the professor is revealed not so much
+by the things he teaches, as by the
+things he fails or refuses to teach.</p>
+
+<p>History is full of examples. How
+many religions have not perished from
+ritual sclerosis, how many sciences
+have not been degraded into pseudo-sciences
+or games! Logic has been
+just examinable nonsense for over
+two thousand years. The present
+economic chaos in the world has been
+indirectly brought about by the policy
+adopted by the professors of economics
+forty or fifty years ago, to suit their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>
+own convenience. For they then decided
+that they must escape from the
+unwelcome attentions of the public by
+becoming more ‘scientific’; <i>i.e.</i> they
+ceased to express themselves in plain
+language and took to mathematical
+formulae and curves instead; with
+the result that the world promptly
+relapsed into its primitive depths of
+economic ignorance. So soon as the
+professors had retired from it, every
+economic heresy and delusion, which
+had been exposed and uprooted by
+Adam Smith, at once revived and
+flourished. In one generation economics
+disappeared completely from the
+public ken and the political world,
+and the makers of the Peace Treaties
+of 1919 were so incapable of understanding
+an economic argument that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>
+not even the lucid intelligence of
+Mr Keynes could dissuade them from
+enacting the preposterous conditions
+which rendered impossible the realization
+of their aims.<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a> Nor was it so very
+long ago that, in order to save the
+Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge,
+it had to be recast, because it had
+degenerated into an intellectual jig-saw
+puzzle, wholly unrelated to the applications
+of mathematics to the other
+sciences. To avoid jealousies, I hasten
+to add that the University of Oxford,
+which has organized itself as an asylum
+for lost causes, skilfully cultivates,
+by means of its classical and historical<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>
+studies, a backward-looking bias in
+its <i>alumni</i>. The true ‘Greats’ man
+is meant to go down indelibly imbued
+with the conviction that in matters
+of morals and politics nothing of importance
+has been discovered or said
+since Plato and Aristotle, and that nothing
+else matters.</p>
+
+<p>Clearly then we cannot take for
+granted that in any society knowledge
+can progress without limits, nor can
+we count on our academic institutions
+to save us from stagnation and decay,
+even in matters of knowledge. All
+institutions are social mechanisms, and
+all mechanisms need a modicum of
+intelligent supervision, in the absence
+of which they become dangerous engines
+of destruction.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>It appears then that we can extract
+no guarantee of progress either from
+the nature of Man or from the nature
+of human institutions. There is no
+<i>law</i> of progress, if by law be meant
+a superior power able to coerce the
+creatures that are said to ‘obey’ it.
+Neither can we extract from history
+any proof of the superiority of civilized
+man over his uncivilized ancestors.
+Such progress as has been attained
+has been achieved only by the active
+co-operation of the progressive
+organisms: every step has been fought
+for, and progress has ceased whenever<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>
+effort ceased, or was switched off into
+different directions.</p>
+
+<p>Consequently, modern man has no
+right to ‘boast himself far better than
+his fathers’—in intrinsic quality. Intrinsically,
+<i>i.e.</i> apart from the effects
+of culture and social training, it is
+probable that he is slightly <i>inferior</i>
+in capacity to his own ancestors,
+while very markedly inferior to the
+great races of antiquity (like the
+Greeks) in their hey-day. Nor is there
+any reason to suppose that his moral
+nature has changed materially. Modern
+man may be a little tamer and better-tempered,
+because he has been herded
+together much more closely than primitive
+man, and city life, even in slums,
+demands, and produces, a certain
+‘urbanity.’ For many generations<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>
+those who would not pack tight and
+could not stand the strain of constantly
+exhibiting ‘company manners’ and
+accommodating their action to those
+of their fellows, must have fled away
+into the wilds, where they could be
+independent, or have eliminated themselves
+in other ways, <i>e.g.</i> by committing
+murder. It is probable that the social
+history of Iceland, settled as it was
+by unbridled individualists who would
+not brook any form of organized
+government, might throw some light
+on this process of taming the individual.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless there is little doubt
+that, in the main, humanity is still
+Yahoo-manity. Alike in mentality
+and in <i>moral</i>, modern man is still substantially
+identical with his palæolithic
+ancestors. He is still the irrational,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>
+impulsive, emotional, foolish, destructive,
+cruel, credulous, creature he
+always was. Normally the Yahoo
+in him is kept under control by the
+constant pressure of a variety of social
+institutions; but let anything upset
+an established social order, and the
+Yahoo comes to the front at once. The
+history of the past fifty years abundantly
+proves that man is still capable
+of atrocities equal to any in his record.
+Not only have we lived through the
+greatest political and the deadliest natural
+convulsion, the Great War and
+the Tokio earthquake, but the Russian
+Revolution has outdone the French
+and Landru the legendary Bluebeard,
+while for mingled atrocity and baseness
+the murders of Rasputin and of Alexander
+of Serbia are unsurpassed in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>
+history. The painful truth is that
+civilization has not improved Man’s
+moral nature. His moral habits are still
+mainly matters of custom, and the
+effect of moral theories is nugatory
+everywhere. Thus civilization is not
+even skin deep; it does not go deeper
+than the clothes.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">V</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Clearly it is risky to expose the
+inelastic nature of so stubbornly conservative
+a creature to new conditions
+at a rapid rate. He may not be able
+to adapt himself quickly enough, and
+his old reactions, which did little or
+no harm before, may become extremely
+dangerous. Yet this is just what
+has happened. Science has exposed
+the palæolithic savage masquerading
+in modern garb to a series of physical
+and mental shocks which have endangered
+his equilibrium. It has also enormously
+extended his power and armed
+him with a variety of delicate and
+penetrating instruments which have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>
+often proved edge tools in his hands
+and which the utmost wisdom could
+hardly be trusted to use aright. Under
+these conditions the fighting instinct
+ceases to be an antiquated foible, like
+the hunting instinct, and becomes a
+deadly danger. No wonder the more
+prescient are dismayed at the prospect
+of the old savage passions running
+amok in the full panoply of civilization!</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VI">VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Nor is this the final item in our tale
+of woe. A third and most sinister fact
+which has to be faced is that Civilization,
+as at present constituted, is very
+definitely a deteriorating agency, conducing
+to the degeneration of mankind.
+This effect of Civilization is nothing
+new, but has been operating, it would
+seem, from the beginning, though not
+probably as intensively as now: its
+discovery, however, is very recent. It
+is quite indirect, unintended, and fortuitous,
+but cumulative, and in the long
+run has probably been a chief cause
+in the decay of States and civilizations,
+as well as an important factor in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>
+arrest of biological development which
+we have had to recognize.</p>
+
+<p>A simple and easily observable sociological
+fact is at the bottom of the
+mischief. The different classes in a
+society have different birth-rates and
+death-rates, and the differences between
+these yield their several net
+rates of increase or decrease. Now,
+whereas under the conditions of savage
+life class differences can hardly exist,
+or, at least cannot be accentuated, so
+that the whole tribe flourishes or
+perishes together, and among barbarians
+the upper classes have a very
+great advantage and the tribe recruits
+itself chiefly from the children of the
+chiefs, because the conditions of life
+are so severe that the lower classes
+are not able to rear many children; in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>
+civilized societies these conditions are
+reversed. It is found that though both
+birth-rates and death-rates grow as we
+descend the social scale, so does the net
+rate of increase. Indeed, the highest or
+ruling class nowhere appears to keep
+up its numbers without considerable
+recruitment from below. So society, as
+at present organized, is always dying
+off at the top, and proliferating at the
+bottom, of the social pyramid.</p>
+
+<p>The disastrous consequences of this
+sort of social organization may easily be
+apprehended, with a little reflection.
+(1) All societies, even those whose
+social structure is most rigid, have need
+of ability, discover it, and reward it by
+social promotion. But (2) as this promotion
+means passing into a class with
+a relatively inadequate rate of reproduction,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>
+the biological penalty attaching
+to social promotion is racial
+extinction. Thus (3) the ultimate
+reward of merit is sterilization, and
+society appears to be an organization
+devoted to the suicidal task of extirpating
+any ability it may chance to
+contain, by draining it away from any
+stratum in which it may occur, promoting
+it into the highest, and there
+destroying it. It is exactly as though
+a dairyman should set in motion
+apparatus for separating the cream
+from the milk, and then, as it rose,
+skim it off, and throw it away!</p>
+
+<p>At present it is calculated that the
+highest classes in the chief civilized
+societies only reproduce themselves to
+the extent of fifty per cent. of their
+number in each generation, so that the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>
+hereditary ability of half of them is
+lost in each generation. But even then
+the remainder is largely wasted. It is
+churned into froth and scum by social
+forces. For neither now nor at any
+time has social intelligence shown itself
+equal to devising a training for the
+youth of the highest classes that would
+provide them with adequate stimuli
+to develop their faculties, and to lead
+a strenuous life of social service. The
+children of the rich are tempted to live
+for ‘society’ in the narrower sense,
+which means frittering away one’s life
+on a round of vacuous amusement; and
+they rarely resist the temptation.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally it is difficult to trace the
+accumulation of ability in the upper
+social strata which is theoretically to
+be expected. On the other hand, in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>
+some subjects at any rate, the symptoms
+of a world-wide dearth of ability
+are becoming unmistakable. The Great
+War, though it made abundantly manifest
+the prevalence of incompetents in
+high places, did not reveal the existence
+either of a great general or of a great
+statesman anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>It is superfluous to insist either on
+the fatuity of a social organization such
+as this, or on the certainty of racial
+degeneration which it entails: but it
+may be well to draw attention to the
+<i>rapidity</i> with which these degenerative
+processes are at present sapping the
+vitality and value of our civilized races.
+The failure to reproduce does not, as
+in former times, affect merely the
+aristocracy in the highest social strata;
+it has spread to the whole of the professional<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>
+and middle classes, and to
+most classes of skilled labour. It is not
+too much to say that, with the exception
+of the miners, none of the desirable
+elements in the nation are doing their
+bit to keep up the population, and that
+its continued growth is mainly due to
+the unrestrained breeding of the casual
+labourers and the feeble-minded.</p>
+
+<p>In the rest of the population its
+increase is checked by birth-control
+and the postponement of marriage,
+neither of which affects the undesirables.
+They are too stupid, reckless,
+and ignorant to practise the former, and
+have nothing to gain by the latter.
+Also, to make it quite certain that they
+shall form a true ‘proletariate,’ the
+wisdom of our rulers ordains that a
+knowledge of birth-control shall be a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>
+(fatal) privilege reserved for the intelligent
+and well-to-do. They instruct
+the police to prevent it from penetrating
+to the poor and stupid—apparently
+from the mistaken idea that the State
+needs plenty of cheap labour and cheap
+cannon-fodder. So child-bearing remains
+compulsory for the wretched
+women of the poor, whereas elsewhere
+only those women produce children
+who desire them, and natural selection
+is thus allowed gradually to eliminate
+the temperament of the unwilling (and,
+therefore, probably less competent)
+mother.</p>
+
+<p>The dysgenic effects of this class-discrimination
+are further intensified
+by other tendencies: (1) The advance
+of medicine and hygiene has enormously
+diminished selective mortality in all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>
+classes, and improved the chances of
+weaklings to survive and leave descendants.
+(2) The advance of philanthropy
+preserves them, especially in
+the lower classes, where formerly the
+mortality was largely selective and a
+high death-rate both counteracted an
+excessive birth-rate and increased the
+value of the survivors. The emotional
+appeal of ‘baby-saving’ goes so
+directly to the heart of civilized man
+that his head never reflects whether the
+particular baby is worth saving, and
+whether a baby from a different breed
+and with a better pedigree would not
+be better worth having. (3) Modern
+obstetrics save the lives of thousands
+of women, whose physique is such that
+in former times they would inevitably
+have died in child-birth. The result is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>
+that child-birth is becoming more difficult.
+Also babies brought up on the
+bottle, which has an irresistible attraction
+for microbes of all sorts, are apt to
+be less healthy than those nourished in
+the more primitive manner.</p>
+
+<p>(4) Lastly, the bastardizing, which
+used formerly to provide for a considerable
+infusion of the blood of
+the upper classes into the lower, has
+now practically ceased. Since the
+merry days of King Charles II, very
+few noble families of royal descent have
+been added to the peerage.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">VII</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Our civilization, therefore, carries
+within it the seeds of its own decay and
+destruction, and it does not require high
+prophetic gifts to predict the future of
+a race which goes the way marked out
+for it by such perversely suicidal institutions.
+It cannot improve, but must
+degenerate, and the only question
+would seem to be whether the decadence
+of Man will leave him viable as
+a biological species. At present it
+looks very much as though his blind
+leaders would lead their blinder followers
+from catastrophe to catastrophe,
+through imperialist world-wars to class-wars
+and to race-wars: but even if, by
+some miraculous rally of human intelligence,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>
+these convulsions should be
+averted, the prospect will not really be
+improved. The violent destruction of
+the human race by war will only be
+more <i>dramatic</i>: it will not be more
+<i>fatal</i> than its gradual decay as its arts
+and sciences slowly fossilize, or peter
+out, in an overwhelming flood of feeble-mindedness.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">VIII</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is the one alternative. We shall
+get to it, if we go on as we are going:
+but it is not our doom. The alternative
+is to exercise the danger by an adequate
+reform of human nature and of human
+institutions. This again seems attainable
+in at least two ways.</p>
+
+<p>The first, and more paradoxical, of
+these would make a direct frontal
+attack on the palæolithic Yahoo, and
+try to bring about his moral reformation.
+The means for this purpose are
+ready to hand. Christian ethics have
+been in being, as a moral theory, for
+nearly two thousand years. If the
+Yahoo could be really christianized, he
+would at any rate cease to cut his own<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>
+throat in cutting his neighbour’s. And
+it is astonishing how much scientific
+support is forthcoming for the paradoxes
+of Christian ethics. It is an
+historical fact that the meek have a
+knack of inheriting the earth after
+their lords and masters have killed
+each other off, and that passive resistance
+wears out the greatest violence,
+and conscientious objection defeats the
+craftiest opportunism, if only you can
+get enough of them. It is a biological
+fact that the rabbit survives better
+than the tiger; and the same would
+appear to be true of the human ‘rabbit’
+and the Nietzschean ‘wild beast.’
+Intrinsically, therefore, Christian ethics
+might be well worth trying.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I could believe it likely that this
+policy will be tried. But the palæolithic<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>
+Yahoo has been dosed with Christian
+ethics for two thousand years, and they
+have never either impressed or improved
+him. Their paradoxes give him
+a moral shock, and he has not brains
+enough to grasp their rationality. He
+will exclaim rather with the gallant
+admiral in the House of Commons,
+when justly indignant at the unheard-of
+notion that a ‘moral gesture’ of a
+Labour Government might be the best
+policy, “Good God, sir, if we are to
+rely for our air security on the Sermon
+on the Mount, all I can say is, ‘<i>God
+help us!</i>’” Besides, the proposal to
+put Christian principles into practice
+would be bitterly opposed by all the
+Churches in Christendom.<a id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[B]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>It may be more prudent, therefore,
+to try a safer though slower way, that
+of the eugenical reform and reconstruction
+of our social organization.
+As to the possibilities in this direction,
+I incline to be much more hopeful than
+either Mr Haldane or Mr Russell.
+Mr Haldane despises eugenics, because
+he is looking for the more spectacular
+advent of the ‘ectogenetic baby,’ to be
+the Saviour of mankind. But he might
+not arrive, or be seriously delayed in
+transmission, or fail to come up to
+Mr Haldane’s expectations; and, meanwhile,
+we cannot afford to wait.</p>
+
+<p>Mr Russell distrusts eugenics, because
+he fears that any eugenical scheme
+put into practice will be ‘nobbled’ by
+our present ruling rings, and perverted
+into an instrument to consolidate their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>
+power. He thinks that dissent from
+dominant beliefs and institutions will
+be taken as proof of imbecility, and
+sterilized accordingly,<a id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[C]</a> and that the
+result would merely be to spread over
+all the world the hopeless uniformity
+and commonplaceness of the ideals and
+practice of the American business man,
+as depicted by Mr Sinclair Lewis.</p>
+
+<p>This prognostication would be very
+plausible, if we supposed eugenics to be
+introduced into the social structure
+from above, privily, and in small doses,
+and by way of administrative order, as
+under the existing Acts to check the
+spread of feeble-mindedness.</p>
+
+<p>But this method would be impracticable.
+It would not generate anything
+like the social momentum necessary to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>
+carry through any radical reform. To
+make it effective, it would have to be
+backed by a powerful, enthusiastic,
+and intelligent public sentiment. This
+presupposes that the public has been
+biologically educated to appreciate the
+actual situation, and has been thoroughly
+wrought up about the fatuity of our
+social order, and understands what is
+wrong with it. If it understands that
+much, it can also be made to see that it
+is fantastic to expect to leap to the
+Ideal State by a social revolution.
+No one now knows what the institutions
+of an Ideal State would be like,
+nor how they would work. We only
+know that they will have to be evolved
+out of our present institutions, even
+as the Superman has to be evolved
+out of the primitive Yahoo. In either<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>
+case, the process will be gradual, and
+its success will depend upon details, on
+taking one step after another at the
+right rate in the right direction, making
+a new adjustment here, overcoming
+an old difficulty there, removing obstacles,
+smoothing over the shell-holes
+and scars dating from Man’s lurid
+past, and, in general, feeling one’s way
+systematically and scientifically to
+better things. Such a mode of progression
+may seem unheroic, but it
+has the great advantage that it is
+unlikely to go irretrievably wrong.
+If we know from the outset that we
+are tentatively feeling our way, we shall
+always be on the look out for traps
+and possibilities of going astray, trying
+out the value of our policies by their
+results, and willing to retrace our<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>
+steps when we have made a false one.</p>
+
+<p>The social temper, therefore, will
+become far more intelligent and reasonable
+than it has been hitherto. It
+will be slow to dogmatize, and will
+regard the <i>toleration</i> of differences
+of opinion as among the cardinal
+principles of a sanely progressive social
+order. For as we can no longer assume,
+with Plato and the other Utopians,
+that <i>perfection</i> may be postulated,
+provision has always to be made for
+the <i>improvement</i> of the social order.
+It can never be accepted as absolutely
+good, but must always be regarded as
+capable, in principle, of being bettered.
+Even the best of established institutions
+are only good relatively to the
+alternatives to which they showed
+themselves superior: under changed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>
+conditions they may become inferior,
+and may fail us, or ruin us, if we do
+not make haste to transform them into
+something better fitted to the new
+conditions. Hence the social order must
+be <i>plastic</i>, and must never be allowed
+to grow rigid. There must always
+be room in it for experiments that
+have a reasonable prospect of turning
+out to be improvements. For progress
+will depend on the timely adoption
+of such novelties.</p>
+
+<p>But society has no means of commanding
+them at will. It has to wait
+till they occur to some one. As biological
+variations have to arise
+spontaneously before they can be
+selected, so valuable new ideas have
+to occur in a human mind before they
+can be tried and approved. Society<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>
+cannot originate discoveries, it can
+only refrain from so organizing itself
+as to stamp them out when they occur.
+It is vitally necessary, therefore, that
+we should beware of suppressing variations,
+whether of thought or of bodily
+endowment, that may prove to be
+valuable.</p>
+
+<p>Also, of course, we shall have to
+realize that our whole procedure is
+<i>essentially experimental</i>, and all that
+this implies. We do not know, at the
+outset, what would be the best obtainable
+type, either of man or of society;
+true, but we mean to find out. Nor
+is it unreasonable to expect to do so
+as we go along. We start with a
+pretty shrewd suspicion that certain
+types, say the feeble-minded, the sickly,
+the insane, are undesirable, and that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>
+no good can come of coddling and cultivating
+them: we similarly are pretty
+sure that certain other types, say the intelligent,
+healthy, and energetic, are inherently
+superior to the former. We
+try, therefore, to improve and increase
+the better types. How precisely, and
+how most effectively we do not quite
+know, though we can make pretty good
+preliminary guesses. So we try. That
+will entail experimentation in a variety
+of directions, with ‘control experiments,’
+and a modicum of mistakes.
+But our mistakes will not be fatal, because
+if we advance tentatively and
+with intelligent apprehension, we shall
+realize them in time, and shall not feel
+bound to persist in any course that
+yields unsatisfactory results.</p>
+
+<p>It is really one of the great advantages<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>
+of eugenics that it cannot proceed
+upon any cut-and-dried scheme, but
+will have to be guided by the results
+of experiment and the fruits of experience,
+each of which will be followed
+and discussed by an intensely interested
+public. For the difficulties of
+eugenics are all difficulties of detail,
+and intelligent attention to detail
+may overcome them all. Thus the
+dysgenical working of civilized society,
+which has come about unintentionally
+through the unfortunate convergence
+of a number of tendencies, may be
+altered similarly, by changing the
+incidence of social forces.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">IX</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>If scientific eugenics can put a stop
+to the contra-selection incidental to
+civilization, Man will recover the plasticity
+and the progressiveness he once
+possessed, and will be able to evolve
+further—in whatever direction seems
+to him best. We need not take alarm
+at this possibility, for with his superior
+knowledge he may surely be trusted to
+make a better job of his evolution
+than the <i>Lemur</i> and the <i>Pithecanthropus</i>,
+who were our progenitors and
+managed to evolve into modern man.</p>
+
+<p>But the process will necessarily be a
+slow one, even though a comprehensive
+scheme of eugenics will be providing
+simultaneously <i>two</i> sources of improvement,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>
+by the elimination of defectives
+at the bottom of the social scale, and
+by the increase of ability at the top.
+As, moreover, time presses, and sheer
+destruction may overtake us before
+eugenics have made much difference,
+it would be highly desirable if some
+means could be found to accelerate the
+change of heart required. For this
+purpose, I am much less inclined to put
+my trust in the advance of pharmacology
+than Mr Haldane and Mr
+Russell.<a id="FNanchor_4" href="#Footnote_4" class="fnanchor">[D]</a> Hitherto new drugs have
+only meant new vices, sometimes (like
+cocaine) of so fascinating a character
+as to distract the whole police force
+from their proper function of repressing
+crime. So it seems legitimate to be
+very sceptical about moral transformation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>
+scenes to be wrought by pills and
+injections.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand there does seem
+to be a science from the possible progress
+of which something of a sensational
+kind might not unreasonably
+be expected. It is, moreover, the
+science most directly concerned with
+affairs of this sort. Psychology, the
+science of human mentality, is, by
+common consent, in a deplorably backward
+state. It has remained a ground
+for metaphysical excursions and a
+playground for the arbitrary pedantries
+of classificatory systematists. Its
+efforts to become scientific have only
+led it to ape assumptions and to borrow
+notions found to be appropriate in
+sciences with widely different problems
+and objects. The results, as the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>
+psychologists themselves confess, are
+meagre and disappointing; which, of
+course, only proves that the borrowed
+notions are inappropriate and incapable
+of making Psychology into an effective
+science. But if psychologists should
+take it into their heads to settle down
+to business, to recognize the primary
+obligation of every science to develop
+methods and conceptions capable of
+working upon its subject-matter,
+and so tried to authenticate their
+‘truth’ after the ordinary fashion of
+the other sciences, namely by the
+pragmatic test of successful working,
+some surprising effects might be elicited
+even from the actual human mind.</p>
+
+<p>For there is reason to suppose that
+its present organization is very far
+from being the best of which it is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>
+capable. It has come about in a very
+haphazard manner, and we are not at
+present making anything like an
+adequate use of all our powers. Hence
+by changing the gearing and re-arranging
+the traditional coupling, so to speak,
+of our faculties, improvements might
+conceivably be wrought which would
+seem to us to border on the miraculous.
+Thus a pragmatically efficient
+Psychology might actually invert the
+miracle of Circe, and really transform
+the Yahoo into a man.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">X</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>I have endeavoured in this very
+summary sketch to show that the
+doom of Tantalus is by no means
+unconditional, and that he can save
+himself if he chooses, and that by no
+superhuman effort, but merely by
+recognizing facts that are right before
+his nose and well within his comprehension,
+and by a little clear thinking
+upon their import. But I would not
+presume to predict that he <i>will</i> save
+himself: history affords no unambiguous
+guide. It seems to show
+that something worse and something
+better than what actually happens is
+always conceivable, and that neither
+our hopes nor our fears are ever fully<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>
+realized. If so, poor Tantalus, hoping
+against hope, fearing against reason,
+may muddle along for a good while
+yet, without repeating either his ancient
+error of imagining that he could sup
+with the gods, or his modern folly of
+using his reason, as Goethe’s Mephistopheles
+declared, only to become more
+bestial than any beast!</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="ph1">FOOTNOTES:</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[A]</a> The most absurd perhaps was the clause,
+appearing in all the Peace Treaties, which made
+‘reparations’ a first charge on all the assets of
+the defeated countries. This, of course, completely
+destroyed their credit, and incapacitated
+them from raising a loan, forcing them to have
+recourse to progressive inflation, and so into
+bankruptcy.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="label">[B]</a> This does <i>not</i> mean, of course, that there are
+no Christians in the Churches, but only that they
+are not in control of these institutions.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="label">[C]</a> <i>Icarus</i>, p. 49.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_4" href="#FNanchor_4" class="label">[D]</a> cf. <i>Daedalus</i>, p. 34; <i>Icarus</i>, p. 54.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="transnote">
+<p class="ph1">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:</p>
+
+<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.</p>
+
+</div></div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TANTALUS ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>