And with the development of philosophical and scientific method that will go on with this great increase in man’s control over himself, another issue that is now a mere pious aspiration above abysses of ignorance and difficulty, will come to be a manageable matter.  It has been the perpetual wonder of philosophers from Plato onward that men have bred their dogs and horses and left any man or woman, however vile, free to bear offspring in the next generation of men.  Still that goes on.  Beautiful and wonderful people die childless and bury their treasure in the grave, and we rest content with a system of matrimony that seems designed to perpetuate mediocrity.  A day will come when men will be in possession of knowledge and opportunity that will enable them to master this position, and then certainly will it be assured that every generation shall be born better than was the one before it.  And with that the history of humanity will enter upon a new phase, a phase which will be to our lives as daylight is to the dreaming of a child as yet unborn.

THE HUMAN ADVENTURE

Alone among all the living things this globe has borne, man reckons with destiny.  All other living things obey the forces that created them; and when the mood of the power changes, submit themselves passively to extinction Man only looks upon those forces in the face, anticipates the exhaustion of Nature’s kindliness, seeks weapons to defend himself.  Last of the children of Saturn, he escapes their general doom.  He dispossesses his begetter of all possibility of replacement, and grasps the sceptre of the world.  Before man the great and prevalent creatures followed one another processionally to extinction; the early monsters of the ancient seas, the clumsy amphibians struggling breathless to the land, the reptiles, the theriomorpha and the dinosaurs, the bat-winged reptiles of the Mesozoic forests, the colossal grotesque first mammals, the giant sloths, the mastodons and mammoths; it is as if some idle dreamer moulded them and broke them and cast them aside, until at last comes man and seizes the creative wrist that would wipe him out of being again.

There is nothing else in all the world that so turns against the powers that have made it, unless it be man’s follower fire.  But fire is witless; a little stream, a changing breeze can stop it.  Man circumvents.  If fire were human it would build boats across the rivers and outmanoeuvre the wind.  It would lie in wait in sheltered places, smouldering, husbanding its fuel until the grass was yellow and the forests sere.  But fire is a mere creature of man’s; our world before his coming knew nothing of it in any of its habitable places, never saw it except in the lightning flash or remotely on some volcanic coronet.  Man brought it into the commerce of life, a shining, resentful slave, to hound off the startled beasts from his sleeping-place and serve him like a dog.