POTENTIALITIES AND APTITUDES 79 



on the physical side by selective agencies, how much 

 more dubious must we be in the case of mental, moral 

 and emotional qualities ? I regard with dismay such 

 bold pronouncements as those made by Professor 

 Bateson, in the second part of his Presidential Address 

 to the Australian Meeting of the British Association, 

 for although he himself has been wise enough to 

 refrain from particular instances, he has opened the 

 flood-gates to dogmatic quackery. For there is no 

 scrap of positive evidence in favour of including 

 mental potentialities and aptitudes in such a genera- 

 lization as the following : " With little hesitation 

 we can now declare that the potentialities and apti- 

 tudes, physical as well as mental, sex, colours, powers 

 of work or of invention, liability to diseases, possible 

 duration of life, and the other features by which the 

 members of a mixed population differ from each 

 other, are determined from the moment of fertiliza- 

 tion." There is nothing but theory to support the 

 proposition that in the case of man, nature has " an 

 overwhelmingly greater significance " than nurture. 

 Whether such views be true or not, I do not know ; 

 no one knows. They are inferences from " characters 

 on which we can experiment " ; from the combs of 

 chickens, the feathers of pigeons, the stature of 

 hybrid peas, the inheritance of defects of the eyes, 

 of abnormalities of the blood-vessels and of pigments. 

 What I do know is that there is the whole difference 

 in the world between " mute inglorious Miltons " 

 and the actual Milton who wrote Paradise Lost. 

 Whatever was determined at the moment of fertiliza- 

 tion of the egg-cell which grew into Milton it was a 

 very tiny factor in the production of the " organ- 



