"
"Segregation of the unfit," he remarked to an interviewer after the
Eugenic Conference, at which much was unhappily said that wholly
justified his caustic denunciation, "is a mere excuse for establishing
a medical tyranny. And we have enough of this kind of tyranny already
... the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight.... Eugenics
is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific
priestcraft."
Thus his radicalism and his so-called fads were born of his high
aspirations. He was not the recluse calmly spinning theories from a
bewildering chaos of observations, and building up isolated facts into
the unity of a great and illuminating conception in the silence and
solitude of his library, unmindful of the great world of sin and sorrow
without. He could say with Darwin, "I was born a naturalist"; but we can
add that his heart was on fire with love for the toiling masses. He had
felt the intense joy of discovering a vast and splendid generalisation,
which not only worked a complete revolution in biological science, but
has also illuminated the whole field of human knowledge. Yet his
greatest ambition was to improve the cruel conditions under which
thousands of his fellow-creatures suffered and died, and to make their
lives sweeter and happier. His mind was great enough and his heart large
enough to encompass all that lies between the visible horizons of human
thought and activity, and even in his old age he lived upon the topmost
peaks, eagerly looking for the horizon beyond.
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