Читать книгу Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development - Galton Francis - Страница 18

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Energy is the capacity for labour. It is consistent with all the robust virtues, and makes a large practice of them possible. It is the measure of fulness of life; the more energy the more abundance of it; no energy at all is death; idiots are feeble and listless. In the inquiries I made on the antecedents of men of science no points came out more strongly than that the leaders of scientific thought were generally gifted with remarkable energy, and that they had [2] inherited the gift of it from their parents and grandparents. I have since found the same to be the case in other careers.

[Footnote 2: That is, with questions bearing on what is termed in Greek, eugenes, namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities. This, and the allied words, eugeneia, etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalised one than viriculture, which I once ventured to use.]

Energy is an attribute of the higher races, being favoured beyond all other qualities by natural selection. We are goaded into activity by the conditions and struggles of life. They afford stimuli that oppress and worry the weakly, who complain and bewail, and it may be succumb to them, but which the energetic man welcomes with a good-humoured shrug, and is the better for in the end.

The stimuli may be of any description: the only important matter is that all the faculties should be kept working to prevent their perishing by disuse. If the faculties are few, very simple stimuli will suffice. Even that of fleas will go a long way. A dog is continually scratching himself, and a bird pluming itself, whenever they are not occupied with food, hunting, fighting, or love. In those blank times there is very little for them to attend to besides their varied cutaneous irritations. It is a matter of observation that well washed and combed domestic pets grow dull; they miss the stimulus of fleas. If animals did not prosper through the agency of their insect plagues, it seems probable that their races would long since have been so modified that their bodies should have ceased to afford a pasture-ground for parasites.

It does not seem to follow that because men are capable of doing hard work they like it. Some, indeed, fidget and fret if they cannot otherwise work off their superfluous steam; but on the other hand there are many big lazy fellows who will not get up their steam to full pressure except under compulsion. Again, the character of the stimulus that induces hard work differs greatly in different persons; it may be wealth, ambition, or other object of passion. The solitary hard workers, under no encouragement or compulsion except their sense of duty to their generation, are unfortunately still rare among us.

It may be objected that if the race were too healthy and energetic there would be insufficient call for the exercise of the pitying and self-denying virtues, and the character of men would grow harder in consequence. But it does not seem reasonable to preserve sickly breeds for the sole purpose of tending them, as the breed of foxes is preserved solely for sport and its attendant advantages. There is little fear that misery will ever cease from the land, or that the compassionate will fail to find objects for their compassion; but at present the supply vastly exceeds the demand: the land is overstocked and overburdened with the listless and the incapable.

In any scheme of eugenics, energy is the most important quality to favour; it is, as we have seen, the basis of living action, and it is eminently transmissible by descent.