PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMIT OF EUGENICS 393 



heritance. Professor Ames, of Chicago, indicates something of the 

 process of its acquirement : 



Every human being, if he is to live at all, is, from infancy, surrounded and 

 cared for by persons. These persons fit into and help constitute a social group. 

 The child is nourished, sheltered, guided and disciplined by this human environ- 

 ment. All objects and influences are mediated by the persons near him. His 

 very sensations are determined and modified by them. 10 



The old-time evolutionist and the modern eugenist alike make little 

 of social control in their effort to make clear the biological control of 

 social processes. To them environment is merely external. 



Let us now turn briefly to the list quoted from Davenport : Poverty 

 is a problem, but we may ask in the words of Professor Cooley, of 

 Michigan : 



What shall we say of the doctrine very widely, though perhaps not very 

 clearly, held that the poor are the "unfit" in course of elimination? . . . The 

 truth is that poverty is unfitness, but in a social and not a biological sense. 

 That is to say, it means that feeding, housing, family life, education and oppor- 

 tunity are below the standards that the social type calls for, and that their ex- 

 istence endangers the latter in a manner analogous to the presence of inferior 

 cattle in a herd endangers the biological type. . . . But since the unfitness is 

 social rather than biological, the method of elimination must also be social, 

 namely, reform of housing and neighborhood conditions, improvement of the 

 schools, public teaching of trades, abolition of child labor and the humanizing 

 of industry. 11 



The subject of sexual immorality is absorbing our attention these 

 days. Flexner says that it 



plainly is absurd to speak as if women took to prostitution simply because they 

 were marked out for a vicious life by innate depravity or even forced into it by 

 economic pressure. 12 



If this kind of immorality were inherent we should, according to 

 their own confessions, begin with the elimination of the greatest moral 

 teacher of the early church, St. Augustine, and the greatest stimulator 

 of modern social ideals, Count Tolstoy. The sex mores of Eussia to- 

 day are very different from those of America, and from those of Tol- 

 stoy's youth, and from what they will be a generation hence, all without 

 the slightest help from eugenics, solely by the psychic force of social 

 control. To be sure a part of the prostitutes are feeble minded, but even 

 they are prostitutes largely as a result of the mores of their group and 

 the commercial demand for their services. 



As to the criminalistic, Lombroso with great pains made an anthro- 

 pological description of the criminalistic type, but scarcely a criminol- 

 ogist in Europe or America to-day accepts his conclusions, and the mod- 

 ern science of penology is based on the system of social control. 



io Psychological Bulletin, VIII., p. 407. 



11 C. H. Cooley, ' ' Social Organization, ' ' pp. 294, 296. 



12 Abraham Flexner, ' ' Prostitution in Europe, ' ' quoted from The Survey, 

 January 17, 1914. 



vol. lxxxiv. — 27. 



