THE RENAISSANCE OF PSYCHOLOGY 



apparent than real;' yet a still greater fusion of comple- 

 mentary methods and programs is essential to further 

 progress. 



A most comprehensive problem of psycho-biology is 

 that conventionally summarized as the apportionment of 

 behavior to heredity and to training, to nature or nurture. 

 That mental heredity must follow the clues of physical 

 heredity is certain. With such a novel and definite advance 

 as followed the rediscovery of Mendel's experiments, there 

 arose the hope that the secret of the mental inheritance had 

 been found; and in a sense, it has. From peas to humans, 

 the laws of genetics apply: the genes, with their definite 

 mode of organization and of hereditary transmission, are 

 as responsible for qualities of brains as of the skeletal 

 tissues; they hold from mice to men.^ Like genes breed like 

 genes; but the drawings are made in a composite lottery. 

 The particular genes which appear in our own make-up, 

 and from whence they came, remain uncertain. In one sense, 

 therefore, the problem has been as much complicated as 

 solved. Life remains a chance — our chance in parents and 

 ancestors, and theirs in us. Just how far genetic procedure 

 may be applied in analyzing the mental dowry is still 

 a vexed, though a clarified, issue. The general trend 

 of it all is clear: mental heredity is real though variable; 

 it is carried in the same mechanisms, genes, chromosomes 

 and all. Yet the world will ever have to depend on chance 

 selection for its favored specimens, whether modernly 

 controlled by the route of eugenics or not. Education has 

 its set limitations. 



Any psychology with an hereditarian emphasis is certain 

 to proceed differently, in some phases, from one definitely 



1 My address on this topic before the International Psychological G^ngress 

 (1929) appears in The Scientific Monthly, November, 1929. 



^ See Herrick, C. J., "The Brains of Mice and Men," Chicago University Press, 

 Chicago, 1926; Wheeler, W. M. ."Foibles of Insects and Men," Alfred A. Knopf, 

 Inc., Nevi' York, 1928. 



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