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difficulty, it may be desirable not only to define our aim and the best method of reaching it, but to suggest one or two simple prior considerations which are seldom taken into account. One of these is the fact that, speaking generally, human development is a development of the higher brain and its new organ, the hand. It may, I suppose, be said that the rest of the organism has not been correspond- ingly developed, but remains essentially on the animal level. What especially con- cerns us here is that this includes the uterine system, which has even tended to retrograde. Here, surely, we have the key to many social and ethical difficulties in the marriage question.
This relatively enormous complexity of brain, disturbing, or at least altering, the organic balance, coupled with the sexual incompleteness of the individual, has cost us dear. All such special developments involving comparative overgrowth must do this. In this case we have gained, of course, a priceless analytical, con- structive, and elaborative faculty. But there seems to be many indications that we have correspondingly lost a direct and trustworthy reaction to the stimuli of nature in its widest sense a reaction that should deserve the name of intuition as representing a practically unerring instinct. A eugenic advance secured by an increase of moral sensitiveness on the subject of parentage may well tend to restore on a higher level these primordial rsponses to excitation of all kinds. But, of course, it will still rest with education, in all senses and grades, either (as, on the whole, at present) to blunt or distort them, or to interpret and train them into directed and controlled efficiency.
At present our mental history seems to present a curious anomaly. On the one hand we see what, compared with the animal, and even with the lower intellectual human, types, is an amazing development of logical precision, ordered complexity of reasoning, rigorous validity of conclusion ; all ultimately depending for their productive value on the validity of the presuppositions from which they start. On the other hand, this initial validity can but seldom, if ever, be proved experimentally or by argument, or established by universal experience. Thus the very perfection of the rational development is always liable to lead us farther and farther astray. The result we see in endless discussions which tend rather to divide than to unite us by hardening into opposed views of what we take for reality, and to confuse or dim the racial outlook and hinder the racial ascent.
It is to be hoped that one result of the creation of a eugenic conscience will be a restoration of the human balance, bringing about an immensely increased power of revising familiar assumptions, and thus of rightly interpreting experience and the natural world. This must make for the solution of pressing problems which at present cannot even be worthily stated. For there is no more significant sign of the present deadlock resulting from the anomaly just indicated, than the general neglect of the question of effective exprssion, and therefore of its central value to us ; that is, what we are content vaguely to call its meaning.
Such a line of thought may seem, for the very reason of this neglect, far enough from the subject to be dealt with from the question of restrictions in marriage. But in the research, studies, and discussions which ought to precede any attempt in the direction of giving effect to an aroused sense of eugenic responsi- bility, surely this factor will really be all-important. It must be hoped that such discussion will he carried on by those in whom what, for convenience sake, I would call the mother-sense, or the sense of human, even of vital, origin and significance, is not entirely overlain by the priceless power of co-ordinating subtle trains of reasoning. For this supreme power easily defeats itself by failing to examine and rectify the all-potent starting-point of its activities, the simple and primary assumption.
I have admitted that the foregoing suggestions offered with all diffidence seem to be far from the present subject of discussion, with which, indeed, I have not attempted directly to deal. I would only add that this is not because such questions have not the deepest interest for me, as for all who realize their urgency.
We shall have to discuss, though I hope in some cases privately, such ques- tions as the influence on descendants of the existence or the lack of reverent love and loyalty between parents, not as " acquired characters," in the controversial sense, but as giving full play to the highest currents of our mental and spiritual
