ginning of all
Eugenics.

CHAPTER IV

THE VENGEANCE OF THE FLESH

By a quaint paradox, we generally miss the meaning of simple stories
because we are not subtle enough to understand their simplicity. As
long as men were in sympathy with some particular religion or other
romance of things in general, they saw the thing solid and swallowed
it whole, knowing that it could not disagree with them. But the moment
men have lost the instinct of being simple in order to understand it,
they have to be very subtle in order to understand it. We can find,
for instance, a very good working case in those old puritanical
nursery tales about the terrible punishment of trivial sins; about how
Tommy was drowned for fishing on the Sabbath, or Sammy struck by
lightning for going out after dark. Now these moral stories are
immoral, because Calvinism is immoral. They are wrong, because
Puritanism is wrong. But they are not quite so wrong, they are not a
quarter so wrong, as many superficial sages have supposed.

The truth is that everything that ever came out of a human mouth had a
human meaning; and not one of the fixed fools of history was such a
fool as he looks. And when our great-uncles or great-grandmothers
told a child he might be drowned by breaking the Sabbath, their souls
(though undoubtedly, as Touchstone said, in a parlous state) were not
in quite so simple a state as is suggested by supposing that their god
was a devil who dropped babies into the Thames for a trifle. This form
of religious literature is a morbid form if taken by itself; but it
did correspond to a certain reality in psychology which most people of
any religion, or even of none, have felt a touch of at some time or
other. Leaving out theological terms as far as possible, it is the
subconscious feeling that one can be wrong with Nature as well as
right with Nature; that the point of wrongness may be a detail (in the
superstitions of heathens this is often quite a triviality); but that
if one is really wrong with Nature, there is no particular reason why
all her rivers should not drown or all her storm-bolts strike one who
is, by this vague yet vivid hypothesis, her enemy. This may be a
mental sickness, but it is too human or too mortal a sickness to be
called solely a superstition. It is not solely a superstition; it is
not simply superimposed upon human nature by something that has got on
top of it. It flourishes without check among non-Christian syste