INEQUALITIES IN CAPACITY 49 



it as a matter patent to common sense that men's Book i 

 congenital inequalities are to a large extent the 

 cause, in every society, of such social inequalities why then 



. . j i .11 .,1 , . insist on this 



as exist m it; and they will possibly say that it isf ac t? 

 a mere waste of time to discuss a truth which is so Because this 

 self-evident. It happens, however, that the more dseiy 3 what our 

 obvious it seems to be to common sense, the more 

 necessary it is for us to begin our present inquiry 

 with insisting on it ; and the reason is that, in spite 

 of its being so obvious, the whole school of contem- 

 porary sociologists, with Mr. Spencer as their head, 

 base their whole method of sociological study on a 

 denial of it. By their method of dealing with social 

 aggregates only, they deny not only the influence, 

 but even the existence of congenital inequalities, 

 and endeavour to explain them away as an illusion 

 of the unscientific mind. They admit, indeed, as 

 our quotation from Mr. Spencer showed, that the 

 primitive man was congenitally different from man in 

 later ages. They admit that the individuals reared 

 in a dry climate, who formed the conquering aggre- 

 gates, were congenitally different from the individuals 

 reared in a moist climate, who formed the enslaved 

 aggregates ; but they absolutely refuse to take any 

 account whatever of the congenital inequalities by 

 which individuals within the same aggregate are 

 differentiated. 



In order to show the reader that such is literally 

 the case, we need not rely merely on such inferences 

 as have just been drawn from the manner in which 

 Mr. Spencer applies his method, and from the 



4 



