IV

EUGENICS AS VIEWED BY THE PHYSIOLOGIST

PROFESSOR WILLIAM HENRY HOWELL

IN his essay upon Evolution and Ethics, Huxley calls our attention in his vigorous and attractive manner to the antagonism that exists between the inner factors tending toward the development of man's moral nature, and those processes in the outer world which impose upon him a struggle for existence. He designates the two modes of evolution as the ethical process and the cosmical process respectively, and he develops at length his belief that in their action upon man they work toward different ends. The conflict that he pictures is familiar to all of us for it is in fact nothing more than the ancient and unending strife between our animal instincts and our moral nature, the struggle between the old Adam and the new.

Nature deals with living things in a large handed extravagant fashion, and her methods are justified, if we may use such a term, by the conditions of the problem. There is nothing in this world of ours so irrepressible as life-it tends to multiply itself, at the expense of inorganic nature, with almost incredible rapidity. The tiny infusoria in a pool of water, the insects that inhabit the earth, the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, if they were provided with favourable conditions and were protected from enemies would, any of them, quickly possess the earth. They

are held in bounds by the cosmical process which so far as living forms are concerned consists essentially, in Galton's phrase, "in excessive production and wholesale destruction." Given the extraordinary fertility of living things a practical balance can be maintained only by the restraining influence of an equally generous mortality.

By means of the sifting process of selection Nature has been working upon animals for untold ages and has been creating those forms which are best fitted to meet the conditions as they exist. Man has been trained in this competitive struggle. He owes his supremacy as a race mainly to the greater development of his brain and the resulting increase in wisdom which has enabled him to overcome his enemies from without, whether environmental or animal. He has used the same powerful weapon in the struggle with his fellowman, first of all for the means of existence and later under civilised conditions for the means of enjoyment. But in man along with his increase in mental power there has been going on the development of a moral sense which finds itself out of harmony with Nature's principle of the survival of the fittest; which in place of self-assertion and self-aggrandisement teaches self-repression and self-sacrifice; which bids us to protect the weak and to succour the unfortunate; which sets up in fact an ideal of conduct toward our fellowman that is at variance with the lessons impressed upon us by the struggle for existence. This process of evolution of our moral nature has been in progress from the dawn of civilisation. In its full fruition it promises a time when the earth. shall belong to the meek in heart rather than to the

strong and crafty. It is needless to say that we are not yet within measurable distance of this millennial state of existence, but it is equally certain that the aspirations of civilised humanity look in that direction, and when we compare our state with that of less civilised peoples or indeed with that of our remote ancestors we are justified in believing that some sensible progress has been made.

It is not necessary perhaps to enlarge further upon this point; I have made use of it simply to emphasise the fact that mankind has proposed to itself certain standards of conduct which are opposed to those that Nature would seem to teach us are necessary to our preservation. In this as in other matters man has not submitted passively, like the beasts of the field, to the order of Nature. By virtue of his intelligence he understands something of the methods of selection employed by Nature and he has applied his knowledge to protect himself from being an unwilling victim to their action. Whether or not he will be forever successful, who can tell? At this period in the evolution of our world man is the favoured form of animal life, but it may not always be so. In the procession of the great year, as Huxley expresses it, at some point in that cosmic cycle whose immense sweep we but dimly comprehend, there may come a downward trend, a tendency toward retrogressive changes in the physical surroundings for which man will be less fitted than some inferior forms of life, but in which he may save his race by his intelligent control of the forces and processes of nature. Already he has used his knowledge successfully to oppose those environmental conditions which

tend to limit his productivity. He not only prays that a higher power may deliver him from tempest and lightning, from pestilence and plague, from famine and sudden death, but he has exerted all of his knowledge to devise ways of delivering himself, and not without a large degree of success. It is stated that in the twelfth century the average expectation of life was but little over twenty years. Disease and famine and war cut down life at such a rate that the new-born child could hope to live for only two decades. In our own times the average expectation of life has been prolonged, in the most civilised communities, to forty-five or fifty years and we know that if we choose at any time to make full and intelligent use of the knowledge even now at our command we can still further safeguard our lives against the destructive agencies that threaten us from all sides. Preventive medicine and all other humanitarian mechanisms are but expressions of the development of our moral nature, and it is safe to say that mankind will continue always to approve such tendencies and will strive to reach higher and higher planes of moral excellence, unless indeed some cataclysm of nature should reduce him again to a feral state and revive the old savage struggle for mere existence.

Knowledge or science has done more than simply to defend human life from the assaults of nature. By means of education and hygiene and all the other agencies of civilisation it has striven to improve the quality of the individual from a physical, mental and moral standpoint, to make him more fit to maintain his position as an independent unit in the competition of

life, and above all to make him more fit as a social unit in a race striving to realise the ideals set by our moral nature. To this work humanitarians of all kinds have devoted themselves with increasing enthusiasm and at no time in our history have their efforts been more intense and more wide-spread than at present. No one is justified in minimising the enormous influence for good, as we see the good, which may be exerted upon an individual by bringing him under favourable conditions of environment. The hope of humanity lies in this direction and we may not place any narrow limits upon the results that are to be expected.

But there is another consideration, another factor, which we may reasonably hope to use for the benefit of our race, as an accessory instrument to aid its development under the laws of the ethical process. The gardener, to use Huxley's metaphor, who is endeavouring to raise certain kinds of fruits or flowers in accordance with his ideals of utility or beauty, not only seeks to protect his plants from the competition of Nature's lusty weeds and to give them the best of soil and nourishment, but he strives also to select the best stock that is attainable for the purpose he has in view. Now in this garden of humanity which we hope to develop according to certain ideals presented to us by our ethical nature can we not also use this last method? Can we not to some extent choose between the good and the bad stock in humanity, and devise some method, humane in character, which shall favour the perpetuation of the good strains and the elimination of the bad? This as I understand it is the province of eugenics. The term is defined officially as "the study of agencies