II The Argument
The marked tendency toward physical degeneracy among the men and women of all civilised races has been the constant theme of physiologists, therapeutists and other specialists; endless explanations have been put forward to account for it, and countless remedies suggested to counteract it. In this question, as in the details of medicine and surgery, the general inclination of the human mind is always towards a treatment of epidemic symptoms, towards vague generalisations in the diagnosis and treatment of individual symptoms, whether the word “individual” in this case refers to a specific sufferer or a correlated class of diseases, towards a regard of effects rather than of causes.
As a reaction against this long-accepted method of dealing with individual symptoms by differentiated treatment, there has arisen a great diversity of so-called “mind-healers,” whose a priori methods and lack of any clearly conceived system have brought their efforts into disrepute. Such were the conditions which over twenty years ago I sought to understand, believing—as I still do—that the whole human race was at some great psycho-physical turning point in its history, and that if the true nature of this evolutionary stage could be understood, it might and should be possible to direct man’s physical and mental progression and so combat, and in time eliminate, a thousand evils which seem to have no counterpart in the world of the lower animals, save in very exceptional cases.
In embarking upon this enquiry I realised from the outset that I was dealing not with a world-wide epidemic but with a stage of progress, and that it was essential therefore that I should at once discard all theories which advocated, implicitly or explicitly, a return to similar conditions. Evolution knows no such return to extinction. The species must go forward to a triumphant perfection, or give place to a more dominant, more complete, self-controlled type.
Now if man as an animal, with an animal body differing little in anatomical structure from other families of the order of Primates, is yet differentiated physically by a susceptibility to disease and bodily degeneration, which, save in very exceptional cases, finds little or no parallel in the lower animals, we must determine the prime cause of such differentiation. The solution of the problem which is commonly put forward, and which has found support in the body calling themselves in England and in the United States “Eugenists,” I cannot accept as universal. This theory rests mainly on the contention that in the human polity the physical struggle for existence has ceased to have effect, that the unfit are permitted to produce offspring equally with the fit, and that for the natural selection imposed by circumstances which are fatal to the weak we must substitute an arbitrary selection in order to maintain the high efficiency of the natural type. Though I am in sympathy with many principles of Eugenics I reject this theory as a universal one. It is inconsistent with the great and inspiring ideal of the progress of the human race toward a mental and bodily perfection. If we believe in the idea of a Purpose running through life, unfolding itself to each successive generation and expressing itself in the terms of human experience; if, in other words, we believe in any scientific theory of development, in any large scheme of progress, it is impossible to accept a theory which assumes the lack of adaptability in man’s physical body to thrive in the conditions which have grown up around him, or to enter its true and natural kingdom of perfect soundness. If we postulate that a third of civilised humanity is unfit to continue the race, we can only conclude that man’s physical evolution has proved a failure, and that the race is doomed ultimately to extinction. And, in the last analysis, it is inconceivable that the prime instinct and desire for reproduction can be overruled at the dictates of any small body of men, or even that such a method, if possible, could be productive of any highly desirable results.
Wherefore I take my stand firmly on the ground that the body of civilised man is capable not only of continuing the struggle for existence but of rising to a higher potentiality. So, returning to the point of differentiation between man and the lower animals, I am now convinced that we must seek for the cause of this physical degeneration not in the pressure of new circumstances of life, but in the progress from one state of being to the next. I maintain that in order to discover the solution of this twofold problem of universal disease and its universal remedy, we must look to this enormous growth of reasoning power, and to the consciousness and realisation of the means whereby the desired effect can be obtained. For the animal and the lower races of mankind do not perform physical acts by any process of reason. They are the servants of that strange directing law which governs the flower in its curiously ingenious devices to ensure cross-fertilisation, no less than the higher mammalia in the rules of their gregarious societies, the law for which we have found no better term than Instinct. It is this “instinct” which guides all the nervous muscular mechanisms of the animal’s anatomical structure, and is traceable as the motive in all functional processes. But in the physical economy of mankind this instinct is actually at war with, and is ever being controlled and superseded by conscious, directive reason.
The number of man’s instinctive actions grows ever more limited, (1) as the result of a complete change of habit, and (2) more noticeably, as the outcome of a mental evolution which prompts him continually to seek a cause for every action, to analyse and endeavour to comprehend the secret springs of his being. Moreover civilisation, with its multitudinous problems of life and its perpetual interplay of personalities, demands even in the minutiæ of physical action a constant reasoning, a deliberate and comparatively rapid adaptation to surroundings such as instinct is quite unable to provide. Thus man’s whole body is a polity ruled by two governors whose dictates are not invariably consistent one with the other; and one governor is frequently disobeyed at the expense of the other. This fact, indeed, is obvious when it is thus considered, but we have to determine the possible outcome. There are three alternatives. The first, a return to the sole guidance of instinct, is unthinkable. The second, the continuance of this dual government, is the very condition which has led to the evils we seek to remedy. There remains the third, namely, that man’s physical evolution points to progress along the road of reasoned, conscious guidance and control. It was this last conclusion which over twenty years ago led me to investigate and to practise the means by which this conscious guidance and control could be obtained, so as to apply it to the eradication and prevention of human ills, and to the maintenance of the body in a high degree of physical perfection.