Illustrations of the Herbert Spencer Lecture 1907.
PROBABILITY, THE FOUNDATION OF EUGENICS.[[6]]
The request so honourable to myself, to be the Herbert Spencer lecturer of this year, aroused a multitude of vivid recollections. Spencer’s strong personality, his complete devotion to a self-imposed and life-long task, together with rare gleams of tenderness visible amidst a wilderness of abstract thought, have left a unique impression on my mind that years fail to weaken.
I do not propose to speak of his writings; they have been fully commented on elsewhere, but I desire to acknowledge my personal debt to him, which is large. It lies in what I gained through his readiness to discuss any ideas I happened to be full of at the time, with quick sympathy and keen criticism. It was his custom for many afternoons to spend an hour or two of rest in the old smoking room of the Athenaeum Club, strolling into an adjoining compartment for a game of billiards when the table was free. Day after day on those afternoons I enjoyed brief talks with him, which were often of exceptional interest to myself. All that kind of comfort and pleasure has long ago passed from me. Among the many things of which age deprives us, I regret few more than the loss of contemporaries. When I was young I felt diffident in the presence of my seniors, partly owing to a sense that the ideas of the young cannot be in complete sympathy with those of the old. Now that I myself am old it seems to me that my much younger friends keenly perceive the same difference, and I lose much of that outspoken criticism which is an invaluable help to all who investigate.
History of Eugenics.
It must have surprised you as it did myself to find the new word ‘Eugenics’ in the title both of the Boyle Lecture, delivered in Oxford about a fortnight ago, and of this. It was an accident, not a deliberate concurrence, and I accept it as a happy omen. The field of Eugenics is so wide that there is no need for myself, the second lecturer, to plant my feet in the footsteps of the first; on the contrary, it gives freedom by absolving me from saying much that had to be said in one way or another. I fully concur in the views so ably presented by my friend and co-adjutor, Professor Karl Pearson, and am glad to be dispensed from further allusion to subjects that formed a large portion of his lecture, on which he is a far better guide and an infinitely higher authority than myself.
In giving the following sketch of the history of Eugenics I am obliged to be egotistical, because I kindled the feeble flame that struggled doubtfully for a time until it caught hold of adjacent stores of suitable material, and became a brisk fire, burning freely by itself, and again because I have had much to do with its progress quite recently.
The word ‘Eugenics’ was coined and used by me in my book Human Faculty, published as long ago as 1883, which has long been out of print; it is, however, soon to be re-published in a cheap form.[[7]] In it I emphasized the essential brotherhood of mankind, heredity being to my mind a very real thing; also the belief that we are born to act, and not to wait for help like able-bodied idlers, whining for doles. Individuals appear to me as finite detachments from an infinite ocean of being, temporarily endowed with executive powers. This is the only answer I can give to myself in reply to the perpetually recurring questions of ‘Why? whence? and whither?’ The immediate ‘whither?’ does not seem wholly dark, as some little information may be gleaned concerning the direction in which Nature, so far as we know of it, is now moving—Namely, towards the evolution of mind, body, and character in increasing energy and co-adaptation.
I have often wondered that the poem of Hyperion, by Keats—that magnificent torso of an incompleted work—has not been placed in the very forefront of past speculations on evolution. Keats is so thorough that he makes the very Divinities to be its product. The earliest gods such as Coelus, born out of Chaos, are vague entities, they engender Saturn, Oceanus, Hyperion, and the Titan brood, who supersede them. These in their turn are ousted from dominion by their own issue, the Olympian Gods. A notable advance occurs at each successive stage in the quality of the Divinities. When Hyperion, newly terrified by signs of impending overthrow, lies prostrate on the earth ‘his ancient mother, for some comfort yet,’ the voice of Coelus from the universal space, thus ‘whispered low and solemn in his ear ... yet do thou strive, for thou art capable ... my life is but the life of winds and tides, no more than winds and tides can I prevail, but thou canst.’ I have quoted only disjointed fragments of this wonderful poem, enough to serve as a reminder to those who know it, but will add ten consecutive lines from the speech of the fallen Oceanus to his comrades, which give a summary of evolution as here described:
As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far