There are, to be sure, the claims and assertions and negative achievements of the youngest of the sciences, eugenics.  They are invincible optimists, the eugenists:  it is perhaps a case of a virtue born of necessity.  Thus Francis Galton, in the preface to the “Bible of Eugenics,” his essays on Hereditary Genius, declares:  “There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed who shall be as much superior, mentally and morally, to the Modern European, as the Modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races.”  High hopes beat in this declaration.  But Galton could not have foreseen that the signing of a scrap of paper by one of the Modern Europeans would let loose all the other Modern Europeans in a pandemonium of horrors the lowest of the Negro races could not but envy as a masterpiece of its kind.  It seemed to be suspiciously easy for him to accept an excuse to slide down the dizzy height he had climbed from the African level.

The eugenists would put their trust in the encouraged breeding of the best and the compulsory sterility of the rest.  But what is the best, and who are the best, and where will you find them when they are not inextricably emulsified with the worst?  It’s a long, long way to the day of a segregating out and in of Mendelian unit-characters.  Besides, this is a strange world of choices.  Nobody is to be considered worthy of parenthood until he has fallen in love properly.  Nobody who would permit an outsider’s decision as to when he was properly in love would be worth thirty cents as a parent.  There is the ultimate dilemma of the eugenist—­the dilemma which destroys forever the dream of a control of parenthood from the point of view of merely psychic values.

NEW PSYCHOLOGY

There are the claims and outcries and promises of the psychologists—­the specialists in the probing of the human soul and human nature.  In our time, the demand for a dynamic psychology of process and becoming, psychology with an energy in it, has split them into two schools—­the emphasizers of instinct and the subconscious, the McDougallians, and the pleaders for sex and the unconscious, the Freudians.  A synthesis between these two groups is latent, since their differences are those of horizon merely.  For the McDougallians look upon the world with two eyes and see it whole and broad—­the Freudians see through their telescope a circular field and exclaim that they behold the universe.  It is true that they own a telescope.

But what has either to offer our quest for light on the future of the species?  Nothing very much.  Thus, to turn to the disciples of McDougall.  In a recent volume entitled, “Human Nature and its Remaking,” Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard contends that Man, all axioms about his nature to the contrary, is but a creature of habit, and so the most plastic of living things, since habit