By so doing, it undoubtedly fulfills the requirements of that popular
philosophy which holds the aim of society to be the greatest happiness
for the greatest number, or more definitely the increase of the totality
of human happiness. To cause not to exist those who would be doomed from
birth to give only unhappiness to themselves and those about them; to
increase the number of those in whom useful physical and mental traits
are well developed; to bring about an increase in the number of
energetic altruists and a decrease in the number of the anti-social or
defective; surely such an undertaking will come nearer to increasing the
happiness of the greatest number, than will any temporary social
palliative, any ointment for incurable social wounds. To those who
accept that philosophy, made prominent by Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart
Mill, Herbert Spencer, and a host of other great thinkers, eugenics
rightly understood must seem a prime necessity of society.
But can any philosophy dispense with eugenics? Take those to whom the
popular philosophy of happiness seems a dangerous goal and to whom the
only object of evolution that one is at present justified in
recognizing is that of the perpetuation of the species and of the
progressive conquest of nature, the acquiring of an ascendancy over all
the earth.
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