BELIEF IN BABIES.

Auckland Star, Volume XL, Issue 17, 20 January 1909, Page 6

BELIEF IN BABIES.

. (By DR. C. W. SALEE'BY, F.R.S., Edin.) If what we call Man were an age-long I , individual, living pn continuously through s i the centuries, actual experience woukk < I tell Him that the sheer optimism of J j Rope, .or the optimism of Leibnitz, or ( j the pessimism which declares we must take (and leave) the world as we find , it, and that "human nature is the same j in all ages," are monstrously untrue. , Growing older, -he would be well aware, • for instance, that his owu nature and his outlook were changing in consequence ■ of his former experiences, just as our outlook differs widely now from that of i the men who lived when humanity was , I much younger even than it is to-day. ' j THE ROMANCE OF EXISTENCE. I Though, however, the human organism I —Man, as we call it—is, and has so long been, continuous, and is at this moment as much modified by the total past as if it were really a single undying individual, or a number of such, yet its persistence is determined by an extraordinary scries of the most abrupt and | dramatic discontinuities. Only a few | decades ago, say eleven, or possibly twelve—a mere second in the history of I the earth—not a single Vuman being j now living was in existence, and the I same will be true of the future. "As | ] for man, his days are as grass, as a I j flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know ; it no more." Not merely are we indi-1 j vidually "as grass," but in a few years j i the hand that writes these words, and I the tissues of the eyes and brains that | : see and perceive them, will actually he I I grass. In the whole of Nature is there I such a colossal paradox? Ceaseless, continuous existence goes on side by side j with ceaseless change, alike in physical ! and psychical life, alike within the ; bounds of any generation, and "from generation to generation."' In our own day the bounds of imagination are undoubtedly widening. Means of communication, the Press, the camera, the decadence of obsolete dogmas, making room for the simple daily truths j of morality which have "the dignity of dateless age" and are too hard for the j toeih of time—these account in large . MODERN AIDS TO IMAGINATION, measure for the fact that the happier half of the world is at last beginning j to realise how the other half lives. I There is perhaps more divine discontent j with things as they are than ever here-' ! tofore, due, as has been suggested, perhaps as much to the modern aids of imagination as to any inherent increase of sympathy. Science, too, in the form of sociology and economics, adds warrant to the demand for some radical reform of the condition of life. It teaches that all forms of life are interdependent; that society is thus an organism in more thau merely loose analogy; that the classes pay abundantly for the state of the masses; and, again and again, in a thousand ways, that there is no wealth but life; whilst medicine teaches that the i tuberculosis, which slays so many members of the niiddle and upper classes, 1 is bred by, and in, the overcrowding i of the lower classes, and that this and many other diseases promise to resist I all measures less radical than the aboli- | tion of half our current social practice.

OUR UNIVERSAL PANACEAS. Hence it is that we hear so much of social reform, and that the promises of representatives of many political isms jostle one another at the gates of our ears. The Ariarchist at one extreme, , and the Collectivist at the other, with the Individualist and the Socialist soriicwhere between—exactly where no one seems to know—offer their panaceas. To mc, I confess they seem little better than the scholastic metaphysics of old days, mistaking words for things, in- , capable of Understanding each other, evading precise definition, and using terms which never mean the same thing ' twice as missiles and weapons of abuse. ! But the leading error common to them ' all, as I seem to see it, is their coneep- i' tion of society as a stable thing—a piece ' of machinery which must be properly ' "assembled," as the engineers say—for- ' getful of the extraordinary discontinuity which inheres in the swift-approaching j death of all its parts, and their replace- ' ment by helpless immaturity. ' THE UNIQUE CASE OF MAN. ] The first fact of society really is that all its individuals are mortals. This we all know; but I question whether even ' Herbert Spencer fully reckoned with it; • and certainly the common run of social speculators have not begun to realise i I what it means. Human life is made up of '• generations, and the key to all progress lies in the nature of the relation between one generation and another. Spencer re- ' cords the case of an Oxford graduate, deI sirous to be his secretary, who did not I know that the population of Great BriI tain is increasing. Here is a capital present fact of the (merely quantiative) relation between successive generations. So I ' far as any influence on their theory or | practice is concerned, it is still unknown i j to nearly all our advisers. Yet this fact I I of the ceaseless multiplication of mail, ' ' which has distinguished him from the first and is absolutely peculiar to him of all living species, animal or vegetable, as Professor Ray Lankester has lately pointed out, is the source of the major facts of history and the besetting condition of every social problem that can be named at this hour. i BELIEF IN BABIES. The professional and dedicated teachers ! of morality seem to mc to be in little ! better case. They believe in babies cer- , tainly, as the prime and only really valid , source of the weal and wealth and . strength of nations, and as the great . moralisers and humanisers of the genera- . tion that gives them birth. They are be- , ginning to join at last in that outcry \ against infant mortality, which some few ; of us began five years ago, and which will . '. yet abolish this abominable stain upon .' our time. But they are lamentably unf informed. They do not know, for in- , stance, that a high infant mortality hab- , itually goes with a higher birthrate, not . only in human society, but in all living . species, as I showed at the Royal Instij tution in February, 190 C; and they have ; yet to appreciate the proposition which 1 ! have so often advanced, and which, to mc, t at any rate, seems absolutely self-evident, ; that until we have learnt how to keep i alive all the healthy .babies now born— ! that is to say at least ninety-five per > cent of all, the babies of the slums in- - eluded' —it is monstrous to cry for more, , "to be similarly slain." These bewail- » ings about our mercifully falling birth--1 rate, uncoupled with any attention to the I slaughter of the children actually born, - are pitiable in their blindness, and would v be lamentable if the*; had any effect— i

of which there Is, fortunately, no sign whatever, but, indeed, the contrary. OUR OBLIGATIONS TO THE UNBORN. Humanitarian sentiment also is terribly misguided. " Why always the benefit of the future? Has the present rio claim upon us?" I have been asked. Assuredly, all sentient Hfe, arid, therefore, pre-eminently all human life, ill which sentiency i 3 so incommensurably intensified by self-consciousnesS; has a claim upon us; but the question could have been asked by no one whose imagination iad been adequately employed. Our posterity will, in due course, be as actual irid present as we, their deeds arid sufferings and hopes as actual and present as ours. They outnumber us as the ocean outweighs a raindrop. To avert evil from orie of them is as much to relieve evil in one of us; how much more to prevent the misery of five in the next generation, fifty in the next, and unnumbered hosts beyond? To serve the future of a. race is not to benefit fiction; the men md women of a hundred and a thousand years hence will be as real as we. And to serve the future is to put out our talent at compound interest and a thous-and-fold compounded. The weak imagination would rather build a sanatorium for consumptives, and see it filled with grateful patients. This is a palpable, sensible good, for which the meanest visual faculty suffices; but the strong imagination would rather open the close windows of nurseries, or work at the mechanical problems of ventilating; aye, or even at the structure of the bacteriological microscope, finding the spectacle, in his mind's eye, of healthy men and women fifty years hence.