ancis, surely our dim notions
of the potencies of Nature must be exalted. The forces that have
erected us from the worm, are they necessarily exhausted or exhaustible?
Who will dare to set limits to the promise of Nature's womb? I mean, in
a word, that the history of evolution is a warrant for the idea that we
ourselves, even erected men and women, are but stages to what may be
higher. We look with contempt upon the apes, but time must have been
when "simian" would have been as proud an adjective as "human" is
to-day: and human may become superhuman.

Many passages might be quoted to show that our expectation of future
progress is well based, and I will content myself with a single excerpt
from the final page of the masterpiece of which all the civilized world
was lately celebrating the jubilee. Says Darwin: "Hence we may look with
some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural
selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal
and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection."

The quotation will suffice to remind us that, if we are to serve the
life of the world to come in the surest way, we must become Eugenists,
accepting and applying to human life Nature's great principle of the
selection of worth for parenthood and the rejection of unworth. We must
modify and adapt our conceptions of education thereto. We must make
parenthood the most responsible thing in life. We must teach the
girl--aye, and the boy too--that the body is holy, for it is the temple
of life to come. We must perceive in our most imperious instincts
Nature's care for the future, and must humanize and sanctify them by
conscious recognition of their purpose, and by provident co-operation
with Nature towards her supreme end. We could spare from education,
perhaps, those fictions concerning the past which are sometimes called
history, were they replaced by a knowledge of our own nature and
constitution as instruments of the future.

Let us grant even, for the argument, that nothing more is possible than
mankind has yet achieved. There remains the hope that that which human
nature at its best has been capable of may be realized by human nature
at large. In their great moments the great men have seen this. That last
sentence is, indeed, a paraphrase from a remark at the end of Herbert
Spencer's "Ethics." Ruskin--to choose the polar antithesis of the
Spencerian mind--declares that "there are no known