Genetics and Ethics 319 



defective inheritance, or is it not frequently the result of bad 

 habits, of arrested development? To charge defects at once to 

 heredity removes them from any possible control, helps to make 

 men irresponsible, excuses them for making the least of their 

 endowments. To hold that everything has been predetermined, 

 that nothing is self determined, that all our traits and acts are 

 fixed beyond the possibility of change is an enervating philosophy 

 and is not good science, for it does not accord with the evidence. 

 It is amazing that men whose daily lives contradict this paralyzing 

 philosophy still hold it, as it were in some water-tight compart- 

 ment of the brain, while in all the other parts of their being their 

 acts proclaim that they believe in their powers of self control: 

 they set themselves hard tasks, they overcome great difficulties, 

 they work until it hurts, until they can say with Johannes Muller, 

 Es klebt Blut an der Arbeit, and yet in the philosophical com- 

 partment of their minds they can say that'it was all predetermined 

 in heredity and from the foundations of the world. 



Whether all the phenomena of life and of mind can be explained 

 on the basis of a purely mechanistic hypothesis or not, that hy- 

 pothesis must square with the facts and not the facts with the 

 hypothesis. It has always been true of those who "sat apart and 

 reasoned high of fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute" that 

 they have "found no end in wandering mazes lost." Whatever 

 the way out of these mazes may be, whether it be found in the 

 varied responses of an organism to the same stimulus, to the intro- 

 duction of memory, intelligence and reason as internal stimuli, 

 or to some form of idealism which finds necessity not in nature 

 but in the spectator, and freedom not in the spectator but in the 

 agent, it is true for those who do not "sit apart and reason 

 high," but who deal merely with evident phenomena, that the way 

 of escape is not to be found in denying the reality of inhibition, 

 will and self control. Because we can find no place in our phi- 

 losophy and logic for self determination shall we cease to be 

 scientists and close our eyes to the evidence? The first duty of 

 science is to appeal to fact and to settle later with logic and 



