If this brief and ragged account of the efforts of biologists brings to the imagination no vision of a world less encompassed with sorrow, the fault is mine. Let us assume that the task had been accomplished to better purpose, for there has been progress, admirable and exhilarating progress. What then? Is it to be assumed that science can do away with all of the trouble of the human race and can transform this vale of tears into the best of all possible worlds? No! Such an eventuality is not to be expected, and if it were a possibility, the result would probably be quite unsatisfactory. Those havens of everlasting joy which our fancies have conceived as the last word in fulfilled desire have always seemed to me to be a little tiresome. There is in them no place for diversity - and variety is a very acceptable thing. The vision of society that advance in science, properly applied, raises in one's mind is a distinctly human society, after all; for the dissimilarity of individual endowments can never be eliminated, the drives of the basic instincts can never be wholly suppressed or sublimated, and man must get along as best he can with an imperfectly designed set of organs which will often function badly.

As I see it, the possibilities of Scientific Humanism, which must not be confused with Literary Humanism, run somewhat as follows:

Under a just and humane government the machine can abolish poverty. Indeed it can furnish creature comforts amounting to luxury, although with the inculcation of healthy ideals, inordinate demands for luxury may be expected to diminish. Birth control can lay the Malthusian spectre of overpopulation and keep the census figures at somewhere near the optimum for effective effort. Genetic information, sanely directed, can lessen the proportion of the mentally and physically deficient, and can raise the average intelligence materially. Medicine and surgery can increase the average expectation of life at birth to sixty or seventy years, and this span can be made relatively free from disease.

Murmurs of criticism will break out at this point, I dare say."This is all very nice, but the chief object of such a program is to make man a sleek, healthy animal. Vice and corruption will still flourish." Not so fast! In a scientific world, the term vice will not be used. It will be replaced by the phrase asocial conduct. And asocial conduct will be studied and understood, prevented or forgiven. Moreover, behavior has a physical basis, though the immediate stimulus may be due to other factors. A considerable proportion of crime is caused, primarily, by defects in the central nervous system. Even slight lapses from ideal behavior may be traced to physical unfitness. We all know how much more at peace we are with the rest of creation when we do not rise in the morning depressed by a headache or a torpid liver. Only recently have we learned what intimate relations exist between the presence of adenoids, decayed teeth, and eye defects and the backwardness or obstreperousness of our children. Can one assume that adults do not have similar physical handicaps?

But, at any rate, I have not finished. Scientific Humanism must take other factors into account. Man's career is determined by the sum total of his heredity and his environment. So is the career of every other organism. But man differs from all other animals in his response to mental training. And here is where greater opportunities for improvement exist than in any other department. Heretofore education has been of too uniform a type. We have tried to shape the heads of our youths in a single mould. How much better it would be to analyze their capacities and to train them according to their nature. A similar system should be applied to adults. They have had little aid in determining their fitness for particular vocations; hence, they often do not fit their jobs at all and are unhappy in them. Proper attention to psychological requirements could rectify this situation. These are practical matters. As such it is easy to recognize their importance. Nevertheless, if psychologists worked from now till the day of doom on such special problems, and if their findings were adopted by all the nations of the earth, the essential ingredient of the remedy for the satisfying life would have been missed. Improper conditioning of the mind, to use the behavioristic term, is the cause, I am convinced, of more unhappiness than all other factors combined. This is a discovery due to psychological research, yet the situation cannot be amended by laboratory technique. It needs a fundamental change in our entire attitude. The fact is that the members of the human race have lied to each other, continuously and systematically, since speech began. They started on this invidious course through ignorance, perhaps; they continue it, in part, through ignorance; but in the main they persist in it because they are afraid to face reality. Can such a mental condition, rooted in the dawn of human experience, be changed? I am an optimist on the subject. It is changing - changing quite rapidly, as any one historically inclined should know. And those who have made the shift are satisfied that life is richer and more attractive than ever before. The known is not always pleasing, but it is less terrifying than the unknown.