ABSTRACT
The idea of man’s improvement was some paean to the human spirit only but – equally important – a precise evaluation of the human body’s place in nature. ‘The growth of science is the growth of the ideas of scientists. Each new or modified idea was born in the brain of an individual scientist’. Galton’s eugenic ideas were hardly original. The main tenets of eugenics derived equally from Classical and Christian philosophies of history, and from nineteenth-century theories of evolution and progress, especially the work of Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer. Galton recommended that the improvement of human beings should become a systematic, ritualised practice, with the result that eugenic harmony would be achieved after a few generations. Biology was crucial to this eugenic narrative of human improvement. Degeneration infused eugenic epistemologies of human improvement with a sense of urgency. Max Nordau recognised this situation perfectly when he depicted Western civilisation as condemned to extinction.
