And if religion, whatever its origin and the more questionable chapters in its past, be now “morality touched with emotion,” I claim that eugenics is religious, is and will ever be a religion. Elsewhere[88] I have attempted to show that religion has survived and will survive because of its survival-value—its services to the life of the societies wherein it flourishes. The religion of the future, it was sought to argue, will be that which “best serves Nature's unswerving desire—fulness of life.” The Founder of the Christian religion said, “I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.” It is higher and more abundant life that is the eugenic ideal. Progress I define as the emergence and increasing dominance of mind. Of progress, thus conceived, man is the highest fruit hitherto. He is also its appointed agent, and eugenics is his instrument.
To this end he must use all the powers which have blossomed in him from the dust. He must claim Art: and indeed in Wagner's great music-drama, at the moment when the prophetic Brünnhilde tells Sieglinde who has just lost her mate that she, the expectant mother, may look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come in the child Siegfried; and when the heroic theme is pronounced for the first time and followed by that which signifies redemption by love—then, I think, the eugenist may thrill not merely to the music, or to the humanity of the story, but to the spiritual and scientific truth which it symbolises.
If the struggle towards individual perfection be religious, so, assuredly, is the struggle, less egoistic, indeed, towards racial perfection. If the historic meaning and purport of religion are as I conceive them, and if its future evolution may thence be inferred, there can be no doubt in the prophecy that in ages to come those high aspirations and spiritual visions which astronomy has dishoused from amongst the stars, and which, at their best, were ever selfish, will find a place on this human earth of ours. If we have transferred our hopes from heaven to earth and from ourselves to our children, they are not less religious. And they that shall be of us shall build the old waste places; for we shall raise up the foundations of many generations:
“We feed the high tradition of the world,
And leave our spirits in our children's breasts.”
[APPENDIX]
CONCERNING BOOKS TO READ
The preceding pages are of course only tentative, preliminary and introductory. I have merely tried to make a beginning. No better purpose can be achieved than that the reader should proceed to study the subject for himself. A few pages may therefore be devoted to the names of some of the books which will be found useful. This is in no sense a complete bibliography, nor even a tithe of such a bibliography. But the reader who makes a beginning with the books here named, or even with a well-chosen half dozen of them, will thereafter need no one to tell him that the culture of the human race on scientific principles will be the supreme science of all the future, the supreme goal of all statesmen, the object and the final judge of all legislation.
Where it is thought that useful remarks can be made they will be made, but neither their presence nor absence nor their length is to be taken as any index to the writer's opinion of the relative value of the works in question.
Heredity. (The Progressive Science Series, 1908.) By Professor J. A. Thomson, M.A.