Fear will have been abolished:  first of all, the fear of outside things and other people; finally the fear of oneself.  And with these fears must disappear forever all those poisons of hatreds, individual and international.  For the realization would come that there would be no reason for, no value in encroaching upon, the freedom of one another.  To-day we are living in a world which is like a forest of trees too thickly planted.  Hence the ferocious, unending struggle for existence.  Like innumerable ages past, the present age is one of mutual destruction.  Our aim is to substitute cooperation, equity, and amity for antagonism and conflict.  If the aim of our country or our civilization is to attain a hollow, meaningless superiority over others in aggregate wealth and population, it may be sound policy to shut our eyes to the sacrifice of human life,—­unregarded life and suffering—­and to stimulate rapid procreation.  But even so, such a policy is bound in the long run to defeat itself, as the decline and fall of great civilizations of the past emphatically indicate.  Even the bitterest opponent of our ideals would refuse to subscribe to a philosophy of mere quantity, of wealth and population lacking in spiritual direction or significance.  All of us hope for and look forward to the fine flowering of human genius—­of genius not expending and dissipating its energy in the bitter struggle for mere existence, but developing to a fine maturity, sustained and nourished by the soil of active appreciation, criticism, and recognition.

Not by denying the central and basic biological facts of our nature, not by subscribing to the glittering but false values of any philosophy or program of escape, not by wild Utopian dreams of the brotherhood of men, not by any sanctimonious debauch of sentimentality or religiosity, may we accomplish the first feeble step toward liberation.  On the contrary, only by firmly planting our feet on the solid ground of scientific fact may we even stand erect—­may we even rise from the servile stooping posture of the slave, borne down by the weight of age-old oppression.

In looking forward to this radiant release of the inner energies of a regenerated humanity, I am not thinking merely of inventions and discoveries and the application of these to the perfecting of the external and mechanical details of social life.  This external and scientific perfecting of the mechanism of external life is a phenomenon we are to a great extent witnessing today.  But in a deeper sense this tendency can be of no true or lasting value if it cannot be made to subserve the biological and spiritual development of the human organism, individual and collective.  Our great problem is not merely to perfect machinery, to produce superb ships, motor cars or great buildings, but to remodel the race so that it may equal the amazing progress we see now making in the externals of life.  We must first free our bodies from disease and predisposition to