TABOO AND GENETICS 67 



of this philosophy, Hterature, psychology, folk- 

 lore and gossip, tied it together with such 

 biological facts as were then known (1901) and 

 wove around it a theory of sex attraction* The 

 same material was popularized by Leland (11), 

 Carpenter (12) and W. L. George (13) to support 

 quite different views. 



George's statement that " there are no men 

 and ... no women ; there are only sexual 

 majorities " (p. 61, op. cit.) has been widely 

 quoted. The feminists, he adds, " base them- 

 selves on Weininger's theory, according to 

 which the male principle may be found in 

 woman, and the female principle in man." 

 Unfortunately, George does not make clear 

 what he means by " principle," so his theory, 

 if he has one, is impossible to appraise in bio- 

 logical terms. From the embryonic idea ex- 

 pressed above, he deduces a very positive social 



♦Note : Weiniger thought he could pick, merely by observ- 

 ing physical type, people who would be sexually attracted 

 to each other. There is much ground for scepticism about 

 this. To begin with, the biological experiments indicate that 

 intersexes are peculiarly likely to appear where two or more 

 races are mixed. So far, there is no exact knowledge about 

 the amount or kind of sex difference in each race. As Bateson 

 remarks ;Biol. Fact & the Struct, of Society, p. 13), one un- 

 versed in the breeds even of poultry would experience great 

 difficulty and make many mistakes in sorting a miscellaneous 

 group of cocks and hens into pairs according to breed. If 

 this is true in dealing with pure breeds, " in man, as individuals 

 pure-bred in any respect are very rare, the operation would 

 be far more difficult." In the human species sexual attraction 

 also obviously depends upon many factors which are not purely 

 biological ; it is rather a complicated sentiment than an 

 instinct. 



