Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of EugenicsSaleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams)
Philosophy
Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics
Saleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams)
Eugenics
To this end he must use all the powers which have blossomed in him from
the dust. He must claim Art: and indeed in Wagner's great music-drama,
at the moment when the prophetic Brünnhilde tells Sieglinde who has
just lost her mate that she, the expectant mother, may look for the
resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come in the child
Siegfried; and when the heroic theme is pronounced for the first time
and followed by that which signifies redemption by love--then, I think,
the eugenist may thrill not merely to the music, or to the humanity
of the story, but to the spiritual and scientific truth which it
symbolises.
If the struggle towards individual perfection be religious, so,
assuredly, is the struggle, less egoistic, indeed, towards racial
perfection. If the historic meaning and purport of religion are as I
conceive them, and if its future evolution may thence be inferred,
there can be no doubt in the prophecy that in ages to come those high
aspirations and spiritual visions which astronomy has dishoused from
amongst the stars, and which, at their best, were ever selfish, will
find a place on this human earth of ours. If we have transferred our
hopes from heaven to earth and from ourselves to our children, they are
not less religious. And they that shall be of us shall build the old
waste places; for we shall raise up the foundations of many generations:
“We feed the high tradition of the world,
And leave our spirits in our children's breasts.”
APPENDIX
CONCERNING BOOKS TO READ
The preceding pages are of course only tentative, preliminary and
introductory. I have merely tried to make a beginning. No better
purpose can be achieved than that the reader should proceed to study
the subject for himself. A few pages may therefore be devoted to the
names of some of the books which will be found useful. This is in no
sense a complete bibliography, nor even a tithe of such a bibliography.
But the reader who makes a beginning with the books here named, or even
with a well-chosen half dozen of them, will thereafter need no one to
tell him that the culture of the human race on scientific principles
will be the supreme science of all the future, the supreme goal of all
statesmen, the object and the final judge of all legislation.
Where it is thought that useful remarks can be made they will be made,
but neither their presence nor absence nor their length is to be taken
as any index to the writer's opinion of the relative value of the works
in question.
_Heredity._ (The Progressive Science Series, 1908.) By Professor J. A.
Thomson, M.A.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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