This is Nature’s way; she produces without limit, groping blindly, experimenting ceaselessly, eliminating ruthlessly.  It takes a million eggs to produce one salmon; it has taken a million million men to produce one idea—­algebra, or the bow and arrow, or democracy.  Nature’s present impulse appears as a rebellion against her own methods; man, her creature, will emancipate himself from her law, will save himself from her blindness and her ruthlessness.  He is “Nature’s insurgent son”; but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task in her old blundering way.  Some men are scheduled to elimination because of defective eyesight; they are furnished with glasses, and the breeding of defective eyes begins.  The sickly or imbecile child would perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the name of charity, and a new line of degenerates is started.

What shall we do?  Return to the method of the Spartans, exposing our sickly infants?  We do not have to do anything so wasteful, because we can replace the killing of the unfit by a scientific breeding which will prevent the unfit from getting a chance at life.  We can replace instinct by self-discipline.  We can substitute for the regime of “Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin” the regime of man the creator, knowing what he wishes to be and how to set about to be it.  Whether this can happen, whether the thing which we call civilization is to be the great triumph of the ages, or whether the human race is to go back into the melting pot, is a question being determined by an infinitude of contests between enlightenment and ignorance:  precisely such a contest as occurs now, when you, the reader, encounter a man who has thought his way out to the light, and comes to urge you to perform the act of self-emancipation, to take up the marvellous new tools of science, and to make yourself, by means of exact knowledge, the creator of your own life and in part of the life of the race.

#The New Morality#

Life is a process of expansion, of the unfoldment of new powers; driven by that inner impulse which the philosophers of Pragmatism call the #elan vital#.  Whenever this impulse has its way, there is an emotion of joy; whenever it is balked, there is one of distress.  So pleasure and pain are the guides of life, and the final goal is a condition of free and constantly accelerating growth, in which joy is enduring.

That man will ever reach such a state is more than we can say.  It is a perfectly conceivable thing that tomorrow a comet may fall upon the earth and wipe out all man’s labor’s.  But on the other hand, it is a conceivable thing that man may some day learn to control the movements of comets, and even of starry systems.  It seems certain that if he is given time, he will make himself master of the forces of his immediate environment—–­

  The untamed giants of nature shall bow down—–­
  The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease
  From mockery and destruction, and be turned
  Unto the making of the soul of man.