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easy of realization. I look for, and already see, a method of
training our children which shall make them masters of their
own bodies; I look for a time when the child shall be so taught
and trained that whatever the circumstance which shall later
surround it, it will without effort be able to adapt itself to its
environment, and be enabled to live its life in the enjoyment of
perfect health, physical and mental. For, as I have already
pointed out, man has progressed towards the higher and more
complex stages of civilization. He has continued to change
his habits of life and, being still far from the highest state
attainable, he will continue to change. The farther he becomes
removed from the primitive uncivilized stage of his evolution,
the less likely is he to have the opportunity in the daily routine
of his life so to exercise the physical machinery that it will be
prevented from working imperfectly by the controls of instinct.
" Conscious control " will enable man to adapt himself more
readily to changing conditions of life. No one who looks out
upon this latter-day world with discerning eyes can fail to see
that the changes tend to become more rapid and more radical
than ever before in the history of the world's progress.
94 Race Culture and the Training of the Children
We look towards the goal, and it is best to seek the highest
and be content with no less, but at the same time it is necessary
that we should consider the practical detail of our journey.
What follows in Parts II and III may seem trivial by com-
parison with the high endeavour I have outlined, but it is the
triviality of the essential detail.
I wish to point the road still more clearly, and to show how
every man and woman may learn to walk upon it.
VIII
EVOLUTIONARY STANDARDS AND THEIR INFLU-
ENCE ON THE CRISIS OF 1914 1
IN the previous chapters I have dealt briefly with the funda-
mentals upon which our whole structure of education and
civilization is based, and have attempted to point to the different
tendencies developed by the individual in the struggle to pro-
gress upon this basis. At the same time I have indicated that
which I am confident is the only true fundamental upon which
mankind in a state of civilization may progress and evolve to a
condition commanding freedom for all time from those limiting,
narrowing, and debasing qualities which belong to the animal
spheres of existence.
It seems to me that the present world crisis indicates that this
is the psychological moment to make a wide application of my
principles, though my reader may consider that I should not
enter the debatable ground of hypothesis in a work which has
been devoted, up to this point, to arguments almost entirely
drawn from personal experiences and observation.
I have dealt with the fundamentals employed in the develop-
ment of the child and the adult, and I have postulated that the
evolutionary progress from childhood to adolescence, and on
through the vicissitudes of life which follow, is determined by
the process adopted, the ratio of progress being in accordance
with the standard of efficacy of this process, and that this
principle of evolution applies equally to a nation.
It then devolves upon us to consider the different processes
adopted by different nations, in order to gauge accurately
their different stages of evolution and their possibilities of
growth and development towards real individual and national
progress.
After centuries of endeavour in the direction of progress in
accordance with well-defined processes, founded upon approved
educational, religious, economic, political, industrial, ethical,
1
This chapter was written at the end of the 1914-1918 war, but the
analysis made in it is still fundamentally valid for the crisis of our
present time.
95
96 Evolutionary Standards
and aesthetic principles, and after a century of unprecedented
progress in the realm of Arts and Sciences, we are faced with
the spectacle, in a supposedly civilized nation, of a debauched
kinaesthesia which has manifested itself in such a display of
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