48 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVII. No. 941 



by men and punished by society. But if 

 our reactions, habits, characters are prede- 

 termined in the germ plasm such men have 

 deserved neither praise nor blame. If per- 

 sonality is determined by heredity alone, 

 all teaching', preaching, government, is use- 

 less; freedom, responsibility, duty are de- 

 lusions; whether men are useful or useless 

 members of society depends upon their in- 

 heritance, and the only hope for the race 

 is in eugenics — always supposing that 

 enough freedom is left to men or to society 

 to control the important function of choos- 

 ing a mate. 



Already a few enthusiastic persons have 

 begun to apply these doctrines to practical 

 affairs. "We are told that children should 

 never be admonished or punished, for they 

 do only what their natures lead them to 

 do; the nature of the child must be re- 

 spected and must be allowed to manifest 

 itself in its own way. Lying and stealing 

 will cure themselves like the mumps, or 

 they will remain incurable, in which case 

 the germ plasm is to blame and nothing 

 could have been done, anyway. Laziness is 

 due to inheritance or to parasites; the lat- 

 ter kind may be cured, but not the former. 

 Thriftlessness, alcoholism and uncleanness 

 run in families and can be cured only by 

 extermination. Men who prey upon so- 

 ciety were born with wolfish instincts, and 

 can not help but eat the lambs. Villains, 

 lawbreakers, murderers should be pitied 

 but not punished; if blame attaches to 

 their deeds it falls upon the marriage 

 bureau and the parents. The world needs 

 hospitals and sanatoria and sterilization 

 institutes for the criminals and vicious, 

 but not courts and prisons, and all punish- 

 ments should be visited only upon the 

 parents to the third and fourth genera- 

 tions. 



Do our studies of heredity lead us to 

 any such radical conclusions? If they do 



we must accept them like brave men. 

 "Truth is truth if it sears our eyeballs." 

 But when theories lead to such revolution- 

 ary results it behooves us to examine care- 

 fully those theories to see if there is not 

 somewhere a fundamental flaw in them. 

 Have we not sailed a little too close to the 

 preformation coast and grounded our ship 

 on the rocks of predetermination? 



One of the most difficult things in the 

 world is to recognize a great truth, to feel 

 its significance, and yet not be carried 

 away by it. Great scientific errors are 

 frequently due not so much to faulty ob- 

 servations as to sweeping conclusions. In 

 biology the search for universal laws is a 

 peculiarly dangerous pursuit. In philos- 

 ophy great errors are often due not so 

 much to false premises as to supposed log- 

 ical necessities. A logical chain has led 

 many a man into the bondage of error. 

 Truth is not usually found in extremes, in 

 "carrying out a process to its logical con- 

 clusions, ' ' but rather in some middle course 

 which is less striking but more judicious. 



Having observed that the main charac- 

 teristics of our minds as well as of our 

 bodies are inherited, it is easy and natural 

 to go further and to conclude that not only 

 all the possibilities of our lives are marked 

 out in the germ, but that all that will actu- 

 ally develop from the germ is there deter- 

 mined and can not be altered. There are 

 many similarities between such an extreme 

 view and the old doctrine of preformation, 

 and it contains a like absurdity. It prac- 

 tically denies development altogether. If 

 the germ is a closed system and receives 

 nothing from without, and if adult charac- 

 teristics are predetermined in the germ, 

 they are as irrevocably fixed as if they 

 were predelineated. 



At the opposite extreme is the view with 

 which we are all familiar, viz., the will is 

 absolutely free; no taint of heredity rests 



