IX
If scientific eugenics can put a stop to the contra-selection incidental to civilization, Man will recover the plasticity and the progressiveness he once possessed, and will be able to evolve further—in whatever direction seems to him best. We need not take alarm at this possibility, for with his superior knowledge he may surely be trusted to make a better job of his evolution than theLemurand thePithecanthropus, who were our progenitors and managed to evolve into modern man.
But the process will necessarily be a slow one, even though a comprehensive scheme of eugenics will be providing simultaneouslytwosources of improvement,by the elimination of defectives at the bottom of the social scale, and by the increase of ability at the top. As, moreover, time presses, and sheer destruction may overtake us before eugenics have made much difference, it would be highly desirable if some means could be found to accelerate the change of heart required. For this purpose, I am much less inclined to put my trust in the advance of pharmacology than Mr Haldane and Mr Russell.[D]Hitherto new drugs have only meant new vices, sometimes (like cocaine) of so fascinating a character as to distract the whole police force from their proper function of repressing crime. So it seems legitimate to be very sceptical about moral transformationscenes to be wrought by pills and injections.
On the other hand there does seem to be a science from the possible progress of which something of a sensational kind might not unreasonably be expected. It is, moreover, the science most directly concerned with affairs of this sort. Psychology, the science of human mentality, is, by common consent, in a deplorably backward state. It has remained a ground for metaphysical excursions and a playground for the arbitrary pedantries of classificatory systematists. Its efforts to become scientific have only led it to ape assumptions and to borrow notions found to be appropriate in sciences with widely different problems and objects. The results, as thepsychologists themselves confess, are meagre and disappointing; which, of course, only proves that the borrowed notions are inappropriate and incapable of making Psychology into an effective science. But if psychologists should take it into their heads to settle down to business, to recognize the primary obligation of every science to develop methods and conceptions capable of working upon its subject-matter, and so tried to authenticate their ‘truth’ after the ordinary fashion of the other sciences, namely by the pragmatic test of successful working, some surprising effects might be elicited even from the actual human mind.
For there is reason to suppose that its present organization is very far from being the best of which it iscapable. It has come about in a very haphazard manner, and we are not at present making anything like an adequate use of all our powers. Hence by changing the gearing and re-arranging the traditional coupling, so to speak, of our faculties, improvements might conceivably be wrought which would seem to us to border on the miraculous. Thus a pragmatically efficient Psychology might actually invert the miracle of Circe, and really transform the Yahoo into a man.