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Inquiries into Human Faculty
importance of attending to the improvement of our race shall have been so
well established in the popular mind that a discussion of them would be
likely to receive serious consideration.
It is hardly necessary to insist on the certainty that our present
imperfect knowledge of the limitations and conditions of hereditary
transmission will be steadily added to; but I would call attention again to
the serious want of adequate materials for study in the form of life-
histories. It is fortunately the case that many of the rising medical
practitioners of the foremost rank are become strongly impressed with the
necessity of possessing them, not only for the better knowledge of the
theory of disease, but for the personal advantage of their patients, whom
they now have to treat less appropriately than they otherwise would,
through ignorance of their hereditary tendencies and of their illnesses in
past years, the medical details of which are rarely remembered by the
patient, even if he ever knew them. With the help of so powerful a
personal motive for keeping life-histories, and of so influential a body as
the medical profession to advocate its being done,
[1]
and to show how to
do it, there is considerable hope that the want of materials to which I have
alluded will gradually be supplied.
To sum up in a few words. The chief result of these Inquiries has been
to elicit the religious significance of the doctrine of evolution. It suggests
an alteration in our mental attitude, and imposes a new moral duty. The
new mental attitude is one of a greater sense of moral freedom,
responsibility, and opportunity; the new duty which is supposed to be
exercised concurrently with, and not in opposition to the old ones upon
which the social fabric depends, is an endeavour to further evolution,
especially that of the human race.
[1]
See an address on the Collective Investigation of Disease, by Sir William Gull,
British Medical Journal; January 27, 1883, p. 143; also the following address by Sir James
Paget, p. 144.
