8o 



The Journal of Heredity 



lesson history can teach us is that it 

 has no lesson to teach." 



If my premises are sound, it follows 

 that an individual who voluntarily 

 and regularly lives morally, must be 

 intelligent. Morality is from this point 

 of view a function of intelligence. One 

 may, of course, be led or forced into a 

 straight path by others; but such an 

 individual can not be expected to stay 

 in the path any longer than he feels the 

 pull of the halter-rope. Hence the 

 morality most desirable must be ad- 

 mitted to be that which represents the 

 reflective conduct of an intelligent 

 population. 



The point I desire particularly to 

 make, then, is that so far as a man 

 acts morally, and knows what he is 

 doing — so far as he is a conscious and 

 controlling agent of his own destiny — 

 he must act intelligently;* he must be 

 guided by his own reasoning ability 

 applied to such data as he can collect, 

 and to his own critical evaluation of the 

 reasoning of other individuals on simi- 

 lar problems. 



This close relation between intelli- 

 gence and morality is not merely a 

 matter of logic, but of observed evi- 

 dence. Statistical researches such as 

 that of Frederick Adams Woods' have 

 shown it to be a fact that intelligence 

 and morality go hand in hand. That 

 immorality and lack of intelligence also 

 go hand in hand can be observed by 

 any who studies delinquency. The 

 dependence of these two conditions on 

 each other is capable of more or less 

 precise measurement, so that to a 

 marked extent a man's intelligence can 

 be predicted by measuring the morality 

 of his conduct, and vice versa. 



INTELLIGENCE THE KEY 



Good conduct is usually thought of 

 as the product of at least three factors: 



^ I do not wish to be understood as attributing to "reason" what it can not accomplish. Action 

 must be the outcome of feeling rather than reason; and the emotions, impulses, and urges, which 

 are, too often, almost independent of reason, are in many connections of paramount importance. 

 Brevity compels me to omit any consideration of them here. In any case — to speak figuratively — 

 it is reason which must decide a disputed point, even though the decision of reason must be carried 

 into effect through some driving power in the mind. Moreover, there is in any community plenty 

 of emotion to meet all requirements. It is reason that is most often lacking, and which I have 

 therefore chosen to emphasize on this occasion. 



* Woods, Frederick Adams, Mental and Moral Heredity in Royalty, New York, 1906. See also 

 Popenoe, Paul, "Will Morality Disappear?", Journal of Heredity, ix, p. 269, Oct., 1918. 



conduct that tends toward the progressive 

 evolution of the human species. 



In the light of this definition it is 

 clear that, theoretically at least, there 

 can be no such thing as unmoral, in 

 the sense in which the word is currently 

 used. Some acts, indeed, may have no 

 appreciable bearing on morality, one 

 way or the other; but they are less 

 numerous than one might suppose at 

 first thought. Usually the balance must 

 fall on one side or the other. One often 

 hears a person (usually, as it happens, a 

 person of immoral conduct) apologeti- 

 cally described as "simply unmoral." 

 This is absurd. The person may not 

 have sense enough to know whether his 

 or her acts are moral or the reverse; 

 but either moral or immoral they must 

 certainly be. 



PREDICTING THE CONSEQUENCES 



As to whether a given act is in effect 

 moral or immoral, the consequences 

 obviously must decide. These natu- 

 rally can not actually be seen in ad- 

 vance ; there are, therefore, two ways of 

 determining whether an act is moral or 

 immoral: 



(1) Retrospection, to see how similar 

 acts under similar conditions have 

 resulted in the past. The "verdict of 

 history" is to some extent crystallized 

 in the mores or "conventional moral- 

 ity" of a people, but at best, as I pointed 

 out, this is useful only to a limited 

 extent, because conditions are always 

 changing. 



(2) Analysis, by which in imagina- 

 tion one deduces what the consequences 

 of an act are likely to be. This is, of 

 course, possible only to a fairly high 

 order of intelligence. But it also takes 

 a good deal of intelligence to interpret 

 correctly the lessons of history. In- 

 deed, some pessimist has said, "the only 



