SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
largely the product of past valuations which have persisted from mere habit. Hence their present salaries do not really prove that an Archbishop is twenty times as valuable to a nation as a scientific genius, or thrice as precious as a Premier, nor even that men now think so. How many of us, for example, really now believe that mere descent from an illiterate medieval baron attests sufficient merit to entitle a man to a hereditary seat in the House of Lords? If we continued to value fighting qualities as highly as of yore, we should promote our actual fighting men. When we want really to defend the House of Lords, we point to its sagacity in gauging the will of the people and to the economic value of its attractiveness for foreign heiresses.
Hence one of the chief needs of a society which desires to reconstitute itself on eugenical principles is a thorough revision of social status. It must bring the social position of various services into closer agreement with their present value. And it must induce a greater feeling of responsibility about the popular valuations and transvaluations of functions, which are constantly exalting the position of the caterers to individual pleasures above the consolidators of man's permanent welfare. It is not good for a society that a cricketer or a prizefighter or a dancer should be esteemed and rewarded more highly than the man who discovers a cure for malaria or cancer.[1]
The humanistic view of metaphysics Schiller expresses in the preface to the 1910 edition of his earliest work "Riddles of the Sphinx."
- ↑ Eugenics Review, April, 1910.
[ 226 ]
