The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 9

dead-weight of the dull, silly, underdeveloped, weak and aimless will have to be carried by the guiding wills and intelligences of mankind. There seems to be no way of getting rid of them. The panics and preferences of these relatively uneducatable minds, their flat and foolish tastes, their perversities and compensatory loyalties, their dull, gregarious resistances to comprehensive efforts, their outbreaks of resentment at any too lucid revelation of their inferiority, will be a drag, and perhaps a very heavy drag, on the adaptation of institutions to modern needs and to the development of a common knowledge and a common conception of purpose throughout mankind. Obsolescent religious forms and plausible political catchwords will be used to rally and canalize their mental weaknesses. The brighter, more energetic types of stupidity and egotism will be constantly organizing and exploiting the impulses and uneasiness of this universally diffused multitude. For here we are not writing of any social class or stratum in particular. The inferior sort is found in greater or less abundance at every level.

Possibly mankind will find that positive eugenics is unattainable and undesirable, and what we have said about the differences in minds in Chapter 7 (§ 14) of Book 8 seems to promise the possibility of an upward extension of negative eugenics by the recognition of definably inferior intelligences. If these can be detected and set aside so that, without humiliation or other cruelty, they can be debarred from breeding, then presently the mass of mankind will begin to follow its leaders up the scale of understanding.

The struggle of intelligent and energetic minds throughout the world to clear out their own lumber and get together for the conscious control of the affairs of the strangely mingled multitude of our kind, to develop the still largely unrealized possibilities of science and to organize a directive collective will, is the essential drama of human life. All other great human events, wars, epidemics, revolutions, strange fashions of living and the like, are by comparison either phantasmal or catastrophic or both.

§ 6 8 The Superfluous Energy of Man

The same forces that have lifted Homo sapiens for a time from off the grindstone of natural selection and allowed all types to multiply, give him also a redundancy of leisure and energy far beyond that vouch-

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 2

safed to any other creature. In Book 8, we discussed the sportive play of animals, which goes on when they escape for a time from the urgency of life. Modern man has developed sportive activities to a quite distinctive degree. Here we cannot make more than an allusion to this development which manifests itself to Mr. Everyman on every hand, in his newspaper, in his conversation, in his participations. Essentially the racemeeting or the dance is the highly organized and regularized equivalent of those rare community games, the flying sports of rooks and the joy-rides of penguins we have already described.

Another outlet for human energy finds its anticipation in the decorative efforts of buzzards and wading birds described in that same section. Man’s excess of energy over his material requirements finds a vent in a multiplicity of imitative and creative activities which we lump together as the Arts. It is not for three modest writers about biology to venture into the cloudy and stormy realm of art-criticism and decide what is Art and what is not; our interest here is strictly confined to the biological meanings and possibilities of the Arts. As we pointed out in our Introduction, biological science itself was created and revived by collectors and artists, and from our point of view there is hardly a dividing line between a man who vents himself in carving stone to represent lovely forms, or in arranging beautiful sounds in beautiful patterns, and one who uses his mind to experiment interestingly with living forms or to pursue thought into its remotest recesses. The impulse in all these instances is akin to sportive play. It is the sportive play of the brain and hands, eyes and ears. It may discover itself to be immensely important, but to begin with it was no more than surplus energy seeking an outlet.

And just as in that earlier section on the play of animals we found it almost impossible to say where sportive play ended and practical training and serviceable experimenting began, so here we have to recognize the stupendous and still increasing value of both sport and art in exploring the possibilities of human effort, feeling and desire. It is difficult to believe that as the ever-increasing productivity of the social organization increases human leisure, the already vast developments of sport, art, creative literature and scientific research will not continue to absorb a larger and larger proportion of the total output of human energy.