It may be objected that if the race were too healthy and energetic there would be insufficient call for the exercise of the pitying and self-denying virtues, and the character of men would grow harder in consequence.  But it does not seem reasonable to preserve sickly breeds for the sole purpose of tending them, as the breed of foxes is preserved solely for sport and its attendant advantages.  There is little fear that misery will ever cease from the land, or that the compassionate will fail to find objects for their compassion; but at present the supply vastly exceeds the demand:  the land is overstocked and overburdened with the listless and the incapable.

In any scheme of eugenics, energy is the most important quality to favour; it is, as we have seen, the basis of living action, and it is eminently transmissible by descent.

SENSITIVITY.

The only information that reaches us concerning outward events appears to pass through the avenue of our senses; and the more perceptive the senses are of difference, the larger is the field upon which our judgment and intelligence can act.  Sensation mounts through a series of grades of “just perceptible differences.”  It starts from the zero of consciousness, and it becomes more intense as the stimulus increases (though at a slower rate) up to the point when the stimulus is so strong as to begin to damage the nerve apparatus.  It then yields place to pain, which is another form of sensation, and which continues until the nerve apparatus is destroyed.  Two persons may be equally able just to hear the same faint sound, and they may equally begin to be pained by the same loud sound, and yet they may differ as to the number of intermediate grades of sensation.  The grades will be less numerous as the organisation is of a lower order, and the keenest sensation possible to it will in consequence be less intense.  An artist who is capable of discriminating more differences of tint than another man is not necessarily more capable of seeing clearly in twilight, or more or less intolerant of sunshine.  A musician is not necessarily able to hear very faint sounds, nor to be more startled by loud sounds than others are.  A mechanic who works hard with heavy tools and has rough and grimy thumbs, insensible to very slight pressures, may yet have a singularly discriminating power of touch in respect to the pressures that he can feel.

The discriminative faculty of idiots is curiously low; they hardly distinguish between heat and cold, and their sense of pain is so obtuse that some of the more idiotic seem hardly to know what it is.  In their dull lives, such pain as can be excited in them may literally be accepted with a welcome surprise.  During a visit to Earlswood Asylum I saw two boys whose toe-nails had grown into the flesh and had been excised by the surgeon.  This is a horrible torture to ordinary persons, but the idiot lads were said to have shown no distress during the operation; it was not necessary to hold them, and they looked rather interested at what was being done. [1] I also saw a boy with the scar of a severe wound on his wrist; the story being that he had first burned himself slightly by accident, and, liking the keenness of the new sensation, he took the next opportunity of repeating the experience, but, idiot-like, he overdid it.