And thousand other signs of purer life;
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness.
He ends with "this is the truth, and let it be your balm." The poem is a noble conception, founded on the crude cosmogony of the ancient Greeks.
The ideas have long held my fancy that we men may be the chief, and perhaps the only executives on earth. That we are detached on active service with, it may be only illusory, powers of free-will. Also that we are in some way accountable for our success or failure to further certain obscure ends, to be guessed as best we can. That though our instructions are obscure they are sufficiently clear to justify our interference with the pitiless course of nature, whenever it seems possible to attain the goal towards which it moves, by gentler and kindlier ways. I expressed these views as forcibly as I then could in the above-mentioned book, with especial reference to improving the racial qualities of mankind, in which the truest piety seems to me to reside in taking action, and not in submissive acquiescence to the routine of nature. It was thought impious at one time to attach lightning conductors to churches, as showing a want of trust in the tutelary care of the deity to whom they were dedicated; now I think most persons would be inclined to apply some contemptuous epithet to such as obstinately refused, on those grounds, to erect them.
The direct pursuit of studies in eugenics, as to what could practically be done, and the amount of change in racial qualities that could reasonably be anticipated, did not at first attract investigators. The idea of effecting an improvement in that direction was too much in advance of the march of popular imagination, so I had to wait. In the meantime I occupied myself with collateral problems, more especially with that of dealing measurably with faculties that are variously distributed in a large population. The results were published in my "Natural Inheritance" in 1889, and I shall have occasion to utilize some of them later on, in this very lecture. The publication of that book proved to be more timely than the former. The methods were greatly elaborated by Professor Karl Pearson, and applied by him to biometry. Professor Weldon of this university, whose untimely death is widely deplored, aided powerfully. A new science was thus created primarily on behalf of biometry, but equally applicable to eugenics, because their provinces overlap.
The publication of Biometrika, in which I took little more than a nominal part, appeared in 1901.
Being myself appointed Huxley lecturer before the Anthropological Institute in 1901 I took for my title "The Possible Improvement of
