The task of social hygiene / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The task of social hygiene / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    INTRODUCTION 13 examination. It is said, for instance, or at all events implied, that we need bestow very little care on the conditions of life because such care can have no perma¬ nently beneficial efíect on the race, since acquired charac¬ ters, for the most part, are not transmitted to descendants. But to assume that social reform is unnecessary because it is not inherited is altogether absurd. The people who make this assumption would certainly not argue that it is useless for them to satisfy their own hunger and thirst, because their children will not thereby be safeguarded from experiencing hunger and thirst. Yet the needs which the movement of organized social reform seeks to satisfy are precisely on a level with, and indeed to some extent identical with, the needs of hunger and, thirst. The impulse and the duty which move every civilized community to elaborate and gratify its own social needs to the utmost are altogether independent of the race, and would not cease to exist even in a com¬ munity vowed to celibacy or the most absolute Neo- Malthusianism. Nor, again, must it be said that social reform destroys the beneficial results of natural selec¬ tion. Here, indeed, we encounter a disputed point, and it may be admitted that the precise data for absolute demonstration in one direction or the other cannot yet be found. Whenever human beings breed in reckless and unrestrained profusion—as is the case under some conditions before a free and self-conscious civilization is attained—there is an immense infantile mortality. It is claimed, on the one hand, that this is beneficial.
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