PROBLEM OF NURTURE AND NATURE 35 



habits of parents. Surely before we can better the race effectually we 

 must learn where our endeavours will have most effect. But because 

 biometricians have ventured to consider what is after all the funda- 

 mental problem of Eugenics, nay indeed of all valid attempts to better 

 social conditions, and because they have been forced to a conclusion 

 which is opposed to much unfounded charitable and philanthropic 

 opinion they have been calumniated as defenders of slums, as the 

 servants of brewers and publicans, as the suborned agents of capitalists, 

 and as modern Herods, whose object is to destroy infancy 1 . 



If we turn from critics of this ill-balanced type of mind to those 

 who read and think before they proclaim in the market-place, we still 

 find almost as much obscurity in their criticism of what we have said 

 and in their appreciation of the evidence on which it is based. What 

 we complain of is that even our most friendly critics are liable to 

 ascend the cathedra with a huge bag of phrases but rarely with a 

 waistcoat-pocketful of established facts. I must stay to illustrate 

 these points by quotations from one or two of our critics. Here are 

 some remarks from a recent lecture by Professor J. Arthur Thomson : 



"Character in its widest sense depends fundamentally on the 

 innate organisation, but its expression depends largely on nurture. 



The adult mind is as much made as born Accepting Professor Pearson's 



valuable work, we are not, however, led to any depreciation of nurture, 

 an art in which we are still in fact tyros.... There is little reason to 

 suppose that we make anything like the most of our hereditary nature 

 along the lines of psychical development. There are great fallow areas 

 in the brain still to be cultivated. Instead of attaching too much 

 importance to nurture, as Professor Pearson contended, we have not 

 yet begun to attach enough." 



I would draw the reader's attention to the passages I have 

 italicised. Now these phrases are absolutely typical, for not a single 

 measurable fact is produced to substantiate them. "The adult mind 

 is as much made as born." What evidence is there for this? The 

 direct evidence that it is not the fact produced by Galton is tacitly 

 put on one side. Galton showed and he has been confirmed by 

 Thorndyke that like twins remained absolutely alike under different 

 environments, and that unlike twins did not become mentally or 

 physically alike under the same environment. 



1 A good illustration of this type of writing occurs in the recent utterances of a 

 man of the market-place who throws overboard "all the deplorable and notorious 

 nonsense published in the interest of obsolete statistical 'methods' or of class or 

 political prejudice." 



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