Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/775

 SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP 759

Haeckel, Wallace, and GaJton, the very idea of perfectibility was discredited. Nevertheless, the language of the fall per- sisted, and of necessity had its unconscious influence on thought. It was therefore quite natural, if not inevitable, that the place of man in the animal series should be worked out in terms of descent and not ascent. But the idea of potency latent in organic evolution was bound to manifest itself.

It was Francis Galton who first, and most fully, made the change from the cosmic and naturalist to the humanist and idealist mood in organic evolution. His doctrine of eugenics shifts the center of interest in man's pedigree from the past to the future. Actually and in point of fact the worst-bred of animals, man has become so because he of all animals has the highest potency for degeneration or for evolution. That is one of the truths revealed to us by evolutionary biology. The other is the legitimacy of aspiration toward a future ideal. But the ideal of evolutionary biology markedly differs from its pre- scientific anticipations. It is an ideal definable as starting from a known potency, and approximately realizable within finite space and time, and to be reached by ascertainable processes, operating within discoverable limits. In short, the ideal of eugenics has the scientific character of being a verifiable ideal, and not an illusory one. It postulates an ideal type, toward which we can definitely steer, and certainly move, with assured hope of approxi- mately, but never actually, reaching it. For the ideal itself undergoes evolution, the very increase of evolutionary potencies and processes being itself the warrant of higher aspirations. Mathematicians express the relation of two paths always converging, but never meeting, by the word "asymptotic." Originating outside the systems of professed philosophers, evolu- tionary idealism has yet its necessary relations to traditional doctrines of idealism and realism. Its place and correlation with these have yet to be worked out and defined. But meantime it may help toward establishing a point of contact with existing systems of philosophy to say that evolutionary ideals express an asymptotic reality.

XXVIII. The favorite recourse of the ill-informed mem-