e. The sound sense in the old Lunacy Law was this: that you
cannot deny that a man is a citizen until you are practically prepared
to deny that he is a man. Men, and only men, can be the judges of
whether he is a man. But any private club of prigs can be judges of
whether he ought to be a citizen. When once we step down from that
tall and splintered peak of pure insanity we step on to a tableland
where one man is not so widely different from another. Outside the
exception, what we find is the average. And the practical, legal shape
of the quarrel is this: that unless the normal men have the right to
expel the abnormal, what particular sort of abnormal men have the
right to expel the normal men? If sanity is not good enough, what is
there that is saner than sanity?

Without any grip of the notion of a rule and an exception, the general
idea of judging people's heredity breaks down and is useless. For this
reason: that if everything is the result of a doubtful heredity, the
judgment itself is the result of a doubtful heredity also. Let it
judge not that it be not judged. Eugenists, strange to say, have
fathers and mothers like other people; and our opinion about their
fathers and mothers is worth exactly as much as their opinions about
ours. None of the parents were lunatics, and the rest is mere likes
and dislikes. Suppose Dr. Saleeby had gone up to Byron and said, "My
lord, I perceive you have a club-foot and inordinate passions: such
are the hereditary results of a profligate soldier marrying a
hot-tempered woman." The poet might logically reply (with
characteristic lucidity and impropriety), "Sir, I perceive you have a
confused mind and an unphilosophic theory about other people's love
affairs. Such are the hereditary delusions bred by a Syrian doctor
marrying a Quaker lady from York." Suppose Dr. Karl Pearson had said
to Shelley, "From what I see of your temperament, you are running
great risks in forming a connection with the daughter of a fanatic and
eccentric like Godwin." Shelley would be employing the strict
rationalism of the older and stronger free thinkers, if he answered,
"From what I observe of your mind, you are rushing on destruction in
marrying the great-niece of an old corpse of a courtier and
dilettante like Samuel Rogers." It is only opinion for opinion. Nobody
can pretend that either Mary Godwin or Samuel Rogers was mad; and the
general view a man may hold about the healthiness of inheriting their
b