Many passages might be quoted to show that our expectation of future
progress is well based, and I will content myself with a single excerpt
from the final page of the masterpiece of which all the civilized world
was lately celebrating the jubilee. Says Darwin: "Hence we may look with
some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural
selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal
and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection."
The quotation will suffice to remind us that, if we are to serve the
life of the world to come in the surest way, we must become Eugenists,
accepting and applying to human life Nature's great principle of the
selection of worth for parenthood and the rejection of unworth. We must
modify and adapt our conceptions of education thereto. We must make
parenthood the most responsible thing in life. We must teach the
girl--aye, and the boy too--that the body is holy, for it is the temple
of life to come. We must perceive in our most imperious instincts
Nature's care for the future, and must humanize and sanctify them by
conscious recognition of their purpose, and by provident co-operation
with Nature towards her supreme end. We could spare from education,
perhaps, those fictions concerning the past which are sometimes called
history, were they replaced by a knowledge of our own nature and
constitution as instruments of the future.
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