This brings us to our second point. Biology, when a knowledge of it is more widely spread among us, will assuredly work a change in public opinion. We have among us thousands of men and women whom we account failures in life; whose existence constitutes our gravest social problem. The drunkard, the wastrel, the thief, the prostitute—these are characters whom society thrusts out. They have proved themselves unfitted for their environment; they cannot act in it with any regularity or seemliness: its laws are not their laws. And the assumption most generally is that these are beings of a lower stamp than the average, unhappily surviving in, or at war with, an environment which postulates a nobler sort of men and women. Is it so?
The finer and more delicately poised a mechanism—whether it be chemical balance, galvanometer, electroscope or what not—the more sensitive is it to its surroundings. Thus the instruments once at Kew Observatory have had to be transferred to the wilds of Scotland to ensure their perfect working—rendered impossible at Kew by the noise and vibrations of encroaching London. Thus, again, the mind of Darwin required for its proper functioning the quiet of a study at Down, in the heart of the country. A ray of light will spoil a delicate experiment: the presence in an observatory of one steel key will hinder the work of the instruments. A boy commits suicide because of the noise of the factory in which he is compelled to work. A girl drowns herself 64 because the worries of her home are intolerable.
The point I would press is that these different examples belong fundamentally to the same category. Whether it be the instrument devised by man, or whether it be the human nervous system itself, that which we are looking at is a mechanism too delicate for the cruel exigencies of an unyielding gross environment. We have but to reflect on one organ alone—on the exceeding fineness of structure, and nicety of adjustment, and definiteness of sense-limit, of the eye—in order to realise that the comparison between the human nervous system and the most delicate of our delicate instruments is more than justifiable.
How do we know, when dealing with any given drunkard, that we have not before us a fine, fine nature, to which the harsh and low conditions of our Western civilisation have simply proved intolerable? How do we know that, instead of blaming him and trying to adjust him to the world, we ought not rather to blame the world, and try to make it a fit place for him to live in?
This consideration—strictly scientific as it is—ought to have very great weight in that new department of biological work which has been named Eugenics. Before lightly saying of any stock that it is not good to breed from, or that it is good to breed from, pains should surely be taken to ascertain whether irregularities and disease evinced by members of that stock do not in 65 reality proceed from their superiority to their environment and to the average men and women about them. Individually they may be irreclaimable, yet, thrown out of gear, miserable and wasted as they are, they may be the carriers of the finest hopes of humanity, of a promise for the fulfilment of which we are not yet ready. Perhaps there is a tendency to be a little over-hasty in our estimates of good and bad stocks to breed from. Perhaps we have not yet fully learnt either the significance of recessive characters or the importance of the mere fact that the unit-characters of a human being are immensely numerous, and their inter-relations therefore extremely intricate. And yet, again, perhaps we are too intolerant of variety, too eager for uniformity.
Here in England we have a mixed population, sprung from many diverse origins. The differences between individuals are many and great. Yet the majority of the population is thrust into the grooves of one educational system, and thereafter compelled to settle down to occupations and modes of life which are the same for thousands together. Any attempt to leave the common rut is looked at askance. What wonder that there are rebels, and that the rebels are unhappy! A society constructed in conformity to true biological principles, instead of suppressing variety would give it welcome as one of the most precious of national characteristics, and would purposely adjust itself and its systems with more 66 accuracy so as to give every sort and type of person the best possible chance for developing his or her peculiar gifts. In a society so constituted, very rare indeed would be the occurrence of insanity.
These considerations should have weight in yet another direction: in determining the counsel which ought to be given to girls as to the choice of a mate.
The importance of soundness of stock has here too been well brought into prominence by the workers in Eugenics; and perhaps it may not be amiss to make one or two suggestions with a view to obviating a too narrow application of the principle of the sound stock.
We must remember, first, that disease is not necessarily evidence of unsoundness. Like some forms of moral obliquity, it may be merely evidence of a quality in the stock which renders it unable to tolerate a given environment. And this quality may be in itself an excellence of the most precious kind. This would be the true account of many cases of insanity, while others would be covered by the action of toxins on the brain. Heredity, we are told in many instances of “insanity,” is more probably a heredity of “special liability to the production of toxins or to the action of toxins on the brain,” than heredity of insanity proper. This view will naturally entail modifications in our methods of treating the “insane,” as well as a considerable change in public opinion with regard to the significance of insanity.