The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The dance of life / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cratic ideal. It need not surprise us to find that Jesus had already said two thousand years ago what Galton, in a more modem and—some would add—more humane way, was saying yesterday. If there had not been a core of vital truth beneath the surface of the first Christian’s teaching, it could hardly have survived so long. We are told that it is now dead, but should it ever be revived we may well believe that this is the aspect by which it will be commended. It is a significant fact that at the two spiri¬ tual sources of our world, Jesus and Plato, we find the assertion of the principle of eugenics, in one implicitly, in the other explicitly. Jules de Gaultier was not concerned to put forward an aristocratic conception of his aesthetic doctrine, and, as we have seen, he remained on the threshold of eugenics. He was content to suggest, though with no positive assur¬ ance, a more democratic conception. He had, indeed, one may divine, a predilection for that middle class which has furnished so vast a number of the supreme figures in art and thought; by producing a class of people dispensed from tasks of utility, he had pointed out, “ a society creates for itself an organ fitted for the higher life and bears witness that it has passed beyond the merely biological stage to reach the human stage.” 1 But the middle class is not indispensable, and if it is doomed Gaultier saw ways of replacing it. Especially we may seek to ensure that, in every social group, the individual task of utilitarian work shall be so limited that the worker is enabled to gain a leisure sufficiently ample to devote, if he has the aptitude, 1 J. de Gaultier, “ Art et Civilisation,” Monde Nouveau, Feb. 1921.
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