Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics - C. W. Saleeby

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choice or selection depends not merely upon the provision of a variety from which to choose—this being afforded by what is called variation, which is the correlative of heredity, both being obvious facts in any well-filled nursery—but also upon the production of more young creatures than there is or will be room for. (If there be room for all, so that all survive, there can be no selection, and instead of survival of the fittest there will be indiscriminate survival.) The choice is effected amongst this superfluity by an internecine “struggle for existence”: hence the “murdering and being murdered,” hence the “blood and tears.” The motor force of the whole process may be symbolised as the “will to life,” ever seeking to realise itself in more abundance and with more success—with more and more approximation to perfect adaptation. The will to death is no ingredient of the will to life. Nature is, so to say, by no means desirous of the process of “murdering and being murdered”: very much on the contrary. It is life, more life, and fitter life, that is her desire: the “murdering and being murdered,” the “blood and tears” are no part of her aim. But they are inevitable, though lamentable, if her aim is to be realised. She must be cruel to be kind—a little cruel to be very kind.[6]

      

      It is imaginable, though no more, that natural selection, in certain circumstances, might have worked otherwise: the penalty for less as against greater fitness might imaginably have been not death but merely sterility—the denial of future parenthood. This is the ideal of race-culture. Had this been possible, Nature could have effected her end, which is fitter and fuller life, without having incidentally to mete out premature death to such an overwhelming majority of all her creatures. But, actually, this was not possible: and, unless the end was to be sacrificed, Nature was compelled—to keep up the figure—summarily to kill right and left. Permitted to reach maturity, the unfit as well as the fit would multiply; and since, in general, the lower the form of life the greater its fertility, the species could not possibly advance, or even maintain itself at the level already gained.

      To drop the figure, the process is a mechanical and automatic one, and its appalling wastefulness and indisputable cruelty are inevitably involved, whilst it so remains.

      Intelligence may be kind to be kinder.—But—and here is the great event—this mechanical, automatic, non-intelligent process has latterly given birth to intelligence, the moral intelligence of man: and the question now to be answered is, what modification can intelligence effect in the moral-immoral process that has created it? Must intelligence abrogate that process altogether, as Huxley declares, on the grounds of its murderous methods? Must intelligence simply look on, recognise, but not reconstruct? Must intelligence reverse the process—as indeed it is now doing in many cases—so that in the new environment of which itself is a factor, that which formerly was unfitness shall become fitness, and vice versâ? Or is it conceivable that intelligence can transmute the process, so that, whilst hitherto mechanical, automatic, and therefore inevitably murderous, it shall become intelligent, pressing towards the sublime end, and reforming the murderous means?

      Hear Mr. Galton himself (Sociological Papers, 1905, p. 52):—

      “Purely passive, or what may be styled mechanical evolution, displays the awe-inspiring spectacle of a vast eddy of organic turmoil … it is moulded by blind and wasteful processes, namely, by an extravagant production of raw material and the ruthless rejection of all that is superfluous, through the blundering steps of trial and error. … Evolution is in any case a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of directing its course. Man has the power of doing this largely so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has already affected the quality and distribution of organic life so widely that the changes on the surface of the earth, merely through his disforestings and agriculture, would be recognisable from a distance as great as that of the moon.”

      Hear also Sir E. Ray Lankester, in the Romanes Lecture[7] for 1905: “Man is … a product of the definite and orderly evolution which is universal, a being resulting from and driven by the one great nexus of mechanism which we call Nature. He stands alone, face to face with that relentless mechanism. It is his destiny to understand and to control it.”

      “Nature's insurgent son,” Professor Lankester calls man in this lecture: and yet again there recurs that mighty aphorism of Bacon, which might well be printed on every page of these chapters, “Nature is to be commanded only by obeying her.” The struggle for existence is the terrible fact of Nature, but is only a means to an end. It is our destiny to command the end whilst humanising the means.

      

      The struggle for existence.—The ideal of eugenics or race-culture is to abolish the brutal elements of the struggle for existence whilst gaining its great end. The nature of this struggle is commonly misapprehended and, as I cannot improve upon the words of Professor Lankester, I shall freely use them in the attempt to show what it really is. He says:—

      “The world, the earth's surface, is practically full, that is to say, fully occupied. Only one pair of young can grow up to take the place of the pair—male and female—which have launched a dozen, or it may be as many as a hundred thousand, young individuals on the world. … The ‘struggle for existence’ of Darwin is the struggle amongst all the superabundant young of a given species, in a given area, to gain the necessary food, to escape voracious enemies, and gain protection from excesses of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness. One pair in the new generation—only one pair—survive for every parental pair. Animal population does not increase: ‘Increase and multiply’ has never been said by Nature to her lower creatures. Locally, and from time to time, owing to exceptional changes, a species may multiply here and decrease there; but it is important to realise that the ‘struggle for existence’ in Nature—that is to say, among the animals and plants of this earth untouched by man—is a desperate one, however tranquil and peaceful the battlefield may appear to us. The struggle for existence takes place, not as a clever French writer glibly informs his readers, between different species, but between individuals of the same species, brothers and sisters and cousins. … In Nature's struggle for existence, death, immediate obliteration, is the fate of the vanquished, whilst the only reward to the victors—few, very few, but rare and beautiful in the fitness which has carried them to victory—is the permission to reproduce their kind—to carry on by heredity to another generation the specific qualities by which they triumphed.

      “It is not generally realised how severe is the pressure and competition in Nature—not between different species, but between the immature population of one and the same species, precisely because they are of the same species and have exactly the same needs. … A distinctive quality in the beauty of natural productions (in which man delights) is due to the unobtrusive yet tremendous slaughter of the unfit which is incessantly going on and the absolute restriction of the privilege of parentage to the happy few who attain to the standard described as ‘the fittest.’ ”

      The survival of the fittest.—Now let us look closely at this most famous of all Spencer's phrases, “the survival of the fittest,” and try to understand its full and exact meaning. There is no phrase in any language so frequently misinterpreted. Even a writer who should know better makes this mistake. Mr. H. G. Wells speaks[8] of “that same lack of a fine appreciation of facts that enabled Herbert Spencer to coin those two most unfortunate terms Evolution and the Survival of the Fittest. The implication is that the best reproduces and survives. Now really it is the better that survives and not the best.” What the correction is supposed to signify I do not know, but the whole passage is nonsense. The implication is neither that the best nor the better survive, but the fittest—or if Mr. Wells prefers, for it matters not one whit—the fitter. This lack of a fine appreciation of words is not, unfortunately, peculiar to Mr. Wells. There is no word in the language that more exactly expresses the fact than the word fittest: as Darwin recognised when he promptly incorporated Spencer's phrase in the second edition of the Origin of Species as the best interpretation of his own phrase “natural selection”![9] Fitness is the capacity to fit: a thing that is fit is a thing that

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