THE RENAISSANCE OF PSYCHOLOGY 



philosophers, and writers generally into propagandists,* 

 particularly in the intimate issue of the relation of the 

 sexes which is pivotal to the quality of social life. 



Achievement is an uncertain test of races for one reason, 

 of the sexes for another; yet they are related. The social 

 environment can go far to disqualify the status of women. 

 The conforming power of social pressure is enormous; that 

 alone is a testimony to the large truth of the environmental 

 psychology. If one were to judge the relative intellectual 

 ability of the two sexes by the frequency of their citation 

 in a standard biographical dictionary, one would reach a 

 conclusion contradicted by all biological evidence. What- 

 ever the scale of difference between the masculine and the 

 feminine intellect, it is not of that order. Opportunity, 

 stimulation, expectation, supporting qualities, the place 

 of career in the total scheme of life — social disqualification 

 as well as original nature — all play a part in the disparity 

 and leave an insoluble equation, because of too many 

 unknown quantities. 



But when the experimentalist compares the school 

 ratings or college standings in a range of artificially 

 selected abstract studies or in elections to Phi Beta Kappa, 

 and concludes, because these are so nearly equalized in 

 young men and young women students, that the commonly 

 accepted views of the mental differences between men and 

 women are the result of prejudices, hearsay, myth, and 

 convention, he is greatly overestimating the value of his 

 technique and as greatly neglecting the biological scale by 

 which all such values must be gauged. 



These scholastic tests are adventitious and tangential in 

 any biological scale; they are not likely to touch the 

 significant differences that support such remote applications 



* Sufficiently illustrated in the volume by various authors, edited by V. F. 

 Calverton and S. D. Schmalhausen, "Sex and Civilization, "* Macaulay Company, 

 New York, 1929- 



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