Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/774

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758 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of organic beings, which individually passes away, but racially abides, continues, and develops toward a definite ideal, or degen- erates to its opposite. The ideal of the city is therefore to the biologist the full realization of racial potency. Who among biologists are stimulated into activity by this vision of civic potency? Increasingly large numbers of the medical profession are animated by the ambition of preventing rather than curing diseases. The noblest instances of missionary enterprise are paralleled by the self-sacrificing adventures and exploits which daily engage the lives of the enthusiasts of the newer medicine. The missions that go out from the Pasteur Institute in Paris to study, say, typhoid fever in Brazil, or from the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool to investigate, say, yellow fever in New Orleans, are merely conspicuous instances of a heroic activity that is normal in that increasing wing of the medical profession beginning to be called the hygienists. Of these many are already organized into large and well-established secular orders, such as the various institutes of public health, sanitation, etc., to be found in every large city. Others less directly, but still more vitally, are beginning to influence both civic and national policy through great institutions of the more regular type of order, such as the Pasteur Institute, and similar organiza- tions incipient elsewhere.

XXVII. A new secular order of biologists is beginning to appear in the eugenists, who seek to develop and apply Mr. Francis Galton's doctrine of eugenics. It belongs to this doc- trine to rescue the "perfect man" from the lumber of archaic survivals, and restore it, not as an idol of a golden past, but as a legitimate ideal of the future. Taken over from theology by political philosophers of the eighteenth century, the idea of the fall of man from a state of primordial perfection became a power- ful solvent of economic and political institutions. An abortive and premature attempt was then made by early biologists and sociologists to use the doctrine as a constructive ideal, by trans- forming it into the conception of a future perfectibility of type. But in the generation which witnessed the classic demon- stration of organic evolution by Spencer and Darwin, by