A STATISTICAL STUDY OF EMINENT MEN. 359 



A STATISTICAL STUDY OF EMINENT MEN. 



By PROFESSOR J. McKEEN CATTELL, 

 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. 



HHHE accounts of great men in biographies and histories belong to 

 -*- literature rather than to science. Modern science is either genetic 

 or quantitative. It seeks to discover those uniformities which we call 

 causes and to use that method of description which we call measure- 

 ment. It is now time that great men should be studied as part of social 

 evolution and by the methods of exact and statistical science. 



History is only the last chapter of organic evolution, and both where 

 similar causes are at work and where new factors have arisen, the 

 parallel between social and organic evolution is instructive. While the 

 Darwinian principle of natural selection as an explanation of the origin 

 of species has an aspect which makes it almost as naive as the doctrine 

 of special creations, it has given an extraordinary stimulus to modern 

 thought. Natural selection is no cause of the origin of species or of 

 anything else, but the environment is the condition of the survival of 

 species and of individuals. Evolution has progressed through the 

 occurrence of variations sanctioned by the environment. We are, it is 

 true, not only ignorant of the causes of variations, but even of their 

 nature. We do not know whether one species has been derived from 

 another by gradual variations in many individuals or by sudden jumps 

 in a few. We do not know whether the type prescribes the individual, 

 or whether the individual forms the type. Yet in spite of our ignor- 

 ance not only of the causes but even of the nature of organic evolution 

 the distinctions formulated by the naturalist are fruitful when applied 

 to social evolution. 



It is evident that there are two leading factors in producing a man 

 and making him what he is one the endowment given at birth, the 

 other the environment into which he comes. The main lines are cer- 

 tainly laid down by heredity a man is born a man and not an ape. A 

 savage brought up in cultivated society will not only retain his dark 

 skin, but is likely to have also the incoherent mind of his race. On 

 the other hand, environment has at least an absolute veto. Had the 

 infant Newton been cast among Hottentots he could have announced 

 no laws of motion. But were those differences small from the point 

 of view of organism, great from the point of view of function which 

 distinguished Dante from his Florentine fellow townsmen innate or due 

 to the circumstances of his life? Here the biological parallel may be 



