Science and Citizenship
centre 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 towards 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 realisable 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 towards which we can definitely steer and certainly move with assured hope of approximately, 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, evolutionary idealism has yet its necessary relations to traditional doctrines of idealism and realism. Its place and correlation with these has yet to be worked out and defined. But meantime it may help towards establishing a point of contact with existing systems of philosophy to say that evolutionary ideals express an asymptotic reality.
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