242 BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN PROBLEMS 



that the most highly creative men (an extremely 

 small group) have remarkably excelled the most 

 highly creative women in poetry, music, and art. 

 When we seek the explanation for this inequality, 

 we come face to face with one of the most difficult 

 of human problems. Does the superiority of the 

 greatest artists arise from the exceptional oppor- 

 tunities which they have had to educate themselves, 

 or does it arise from a superiority of organization in 

 the male, consisting in a more richly developed 

 specific mnemitic heredity? It is self-evident that 

 qualities which do not inhere in the mneme, owing to 

 hundreds of thousands of years of heredity, cannot 

 be formed in a few generations, no matter how much 

 education is available. Even if we tentatively make 

 the large admission that acquired mental characters 

 are, to some extent, though very slowly, inherited, 

 education cannot equalize the sexes in respect to the 

 qualities which are characteristically male or female. 

 But it is extremely difficult to say with confidence 

 what traits are characteristically male or female by 

 inheritance, since there are no male qualities which 

 the female may not exhibit and no female qualities 

 which the male may not exhibit. The peculiarly 

 strong and tender devotion of a mother for very 

 young children is, perhaps, the most distinct of 

 psychical sexual traits, being rarely seen in the male 

 parent. This may reasonably be interpreted as a 

 quality based on mnemic heredity. When we come 

 to deal with the intellectual and emotional qualities 



