workshop, the market-place, and the forest, during the
century after the Apostles died. And we find it much the same as the
actual life of toiling mankind in all ages--full of unwelcome labour and
suffering and continual apprehension, haunted by ghostly fears and
self-imagined horrors, but illuminated by sudden laughter, and
continually goaded on by an inexplicable desire to submit itself to that
hard service of perfection under which, as the priest of the goddess
informed Lucius in the story, man may perceive most fully the greatness
of his liberty.

XXXI

MENTAL EUGENICS

It is horrible. We are being overpopulated with spirits. Day by day,
hundreds of newly-created ghosts issue into the world--not the poor
relics and incorporeal shadows of the dead, but real living ghosts, who
never had any other existence except as they now appear. They are
creations of the mind--figments they are sometimes called--but they have
as real an existence as any other created thing. We love them or hate
them, we talk about them, we quote them, we discuss their characters. To
many people they are much more alive than the solid human beings whom in
some respects they resemble. Obviously they are more interesting, else
the travellers in a railway carriage would converse instead of reading.
Some minds cannot help producing them. They produce them as easily as
the queen bee produces the eggs that hatch into drones. And both the
number and productivity of such minds are terribly on the increase. A
few years ago Anatole France told us that, in Paris alone, fifty volumes
a day were published, not to mention the newspapers; and the rate has
gone up since then. He called it a monstrous orgy. He said it would end
in driving us mad. He called books the opium of the West. They devour
us, he said. He foresaw the day when we shall all be librarians. We are
rushing, he said, through study into general paralysis.

Does it not remind one of the horror with which the wise and prudent
about a century ago began to regard the birth-rate? They beheld the
geometrical progression of life catching up the arithmetical progression
of food with fearful strides. Mankind became to them a devouring mouth,
always agape, like a nestling's, and incessantly multiplying, like a
bacillus. What was the good of improving the condition of Tom and Sal,
if Tom and Sal, in consequence of the improvement, went their way and in
a few years produced Dick, Poll, Bill, and M