Woods: Significant Evidence for Mental Heredity 107 



everyone has something at stake. The 

 tendency is to take every argument 

 subjectively. 



THE BIAS OF HOPE 



People think of themselves and of 

 their own families, ancestors and chil- 

 dren. And then the question of hope 

 comes in — the wish is father to the 

 thought. The preacher, the educator, 

 the reformer, the mother of children 

 does not wish to give up any part of what 

 is for him or her a natural hope and 

 stimulus. Then again, all people of 

 mature years have necessarily, by 

 force of contact with the world, some 

 ideas about human nature and the 

 reasons for human conduct. Very few 

 persons have anything at stake on the 

 nebular theory of the cosmos or the 

 electron theory of matter. These 

 theories can be worked out and settled 

 without opposition from the public. 

 But how great was the storm over the 

 Darwinian Descent of Man! 



If we wish to know the truth, we 

 must cleave to truth-seeking methods, 

 and this means the objective methods 

 of science. In all departments of 

 science nothing is of more importance 

 than the taking of accurate measure- 

 ments, and, if we stop to think of it, 

 nearly all our measurements are meas- 

 urements of differences. The stars are 

 in one place one night and in a different 

 place the next; a description of the 

 chemical elements is a description of 

 their measured differences. So the 

 problem of heredity should be one of 

 measured differences. No inductive sci- 

 ence is absolutely accurate, but all 

 are striving towards an increased accu- 

 racy, an ideal of perfection which loses 

 nothing of its beauty in the imposs'- 

 bility of its attainment. 



The first to apply scientific measure- 

 ments in a large way to human heredity 

 was, as is well known, Francis Galton. 

 All the discussion of the inherent nature 

 of man in all the ages , from the Greeks 

 to the medieval churchmen, from the 

 confused philosphers of the period of 

 Rousseau, even down to the transcen- 

 dentaUsts of almost our own time, was 

 not worth as much as the work of this one 

 man, incomplete and fragmentary as it 



necessarily was. Curiously enough the 

 year 186vS, in which Galton first pub- 

 lished, was also the year in which the 

 now celebrated Mendel first gave his 

 results to the world. Neither of these 

 men was aware of the existence of the 

 other, much less could have imagined 

 the. to a considerable extent, needless 

 and, at times, bitter controversy that 

 was to arise among such of their fol- 

 lowers as were unable to grasp the whole 

 subject and see wherein both methods 

 could be harmonized and accepted as 

 leading towards one great truth . What- 

 ever one may think of the relative 

 value of the micthods of Galton and the 

 methods of Mendel as regards inher- 

 itance among plants and animals, there 

 can be no question that, so far as human 

 psychological inheritance is concerned, 

 the work of Galton and the methods 

 founded and developed by Galton and 

 Pearson are of vastly more importance, 

 at least as regards work already done. 



HUMAN PROBLEM DISTINCT 



It is no use to say that the same laws 

 must apply to plants and animals as 

 apply to man. Only in the most gen- 

 eralized sense is that true and then, 

 perhaps, only for certain laws and not 

 for others. As far as heredity and 

 environment are concerned, our own 

 problem contains right on the face of it 

 something that makes it very certain 

 that the same laws cannot apply. It is 

 inconceivable that environment should 

 act just as much on one individual 

 as on another, that all creatures should 

 be equally at the mercy of their various 

 environments, that some cannot escape 

 from or choose their environments 

 better than others. Certainly the 

 human brain is either more affected by 

 its environment than the brain of a 

 worm or boll of a cotton plant, or else 

 it is less affected. Since our major 

 problem, significant evidence of mental 

 heredity, needs just that unravelling 

 of the heredity-environment complex, 

 our very first problem is to find out if 

 the brains of men, the brains of average 

 men, of great men, of children, of women, 

 of eminent women, of different classes 

 of men, of different races, separately 

 not collectivelv, are more or less 



