300 



SCIENCE, 



[N. S. Vol. XXIV. No. 610. 



astluna and an antitoxin against envy, worry 

 and aimless fear, would advance the welfare 

 of people in general more than a year's added 

 schooling to a million of us. 



The proposition that nature's limitations 

 need not be considered by the reformer of 

 society divides into two. The first is that 

 though there are among individuals great dif- 

 ferences by original nature in the capacity to 

 reason and the capacity to acquire knowledge, 

 there are by original nature no class differ- 

 ences. The evidence offered is an appeal to 

 common experience. In fairness. Professor 

 Ward ought perhaps to have stated that if 

 any class, for instance teachers of science, are 

 selected on the basis of a high standing in 

 these capacities, his statement must soon be- 

 come erroneous, additionally so if they select 

 wives on the same basis. He has in mind 

 chiefly the classes due to the selective action 

 of interest in and ability to get wealth. In 

 such cases it is hard to disprove his claim, 

 though it would be much harder to prove it. 

 The second division of his. general proposition 

 is that which men and how many shall be men 

 of genius whose achievements can be trans- 

 formed into the improvement of people in 

 general is decided not by the gifts of nature, 

 but by the conditions of nurture, the condi- 

 tions being the advantages of education. His 

 evidence for this is first a number of facts 

 showing a certain probability that there are a 

 hundred or more men of native ability enough 

 to do the work of genius which only one man 

 in fact now does, and, second, a rehearsal of 

 the results of Odin's 'La Genese des Grands 

 Hommes,' which proves that the literary men 

 of France have been born most frequently in 

 chateaux and cities offering educational ad- 

 vantages. He somewhat naively takes Odin's 

 facts to mean that ' genius is in things, not 

 men,' disregarding the obvious certainty that 

 if the achievements of men were due to 

 original nature determined by immediate an- 

 cestry, we should still find men of achievement 

 born in such cities, because of the certainty 

 that such select and retain those likely on the 

 Galtonian hypothesis to be the ancestors of 

 men of ability. The very high probability of 

 the birth of a man of ability in a chateau is 



perhaps more readily explained by the fact 

 that men of ability come to own chateaux 

 than by any very great educational advan- 

 tages possessed by these rural homes of aris- 

 tocracy. Odin's research in fact leaves the 

 whole question of nature versus nurture where 

 it was before. The appropriate data are 

 records of children of known differences of 

 ancestry under similar conditions of nurture 

 and of children of known similarities of an- 

 cestry under different conditions of nurture. 

 Data of the first sort, so far as obtained, con- 

 tradict the author's view. Data of the second 

 sort could be obtained without great difficulty 

 in a comparison of the achievements of immi- 

 grants' sons brought up till, say, fourteen in 

 a Russian Ghetto with their brothers brought 

 up in the New York City schools. 



Proof that education decides which ones 

 or how many shall be leaders in achievement 

 is really not so important to Professor Ward's 

 general plea for ' all knowledge for all men ' 

 as it seems to be in his pages. There are, of 

 course, two ways of viewing a man's achieve- 

 ment, as to its absolute amount and as to its 

 amount in comparison with the achievements 

 of his contemporaries. The former quality is 

 the one of importance to people in general; 

 the latter is the one by which a man gains 

 eminence. No one doubts that the former is 

 due largely to the environment ; with the back- 

 ing of a modern education I may make a dis^ 

 covery which Aristotle could never have made. 

 The latter may be due almost entirely to the 

 gifts of original nature and these may deny 

 the world more than one Aristotle a century, 

 and still the value of universal and advanced 

 education may be extreme. The one failure 

 in clearness of this volume is its failure to 

 distinguish between absolute and relative 

 achievement and to assign the proper social 

 value to each. Professor Ward seems to think 

 that a great desideratum is the elevation of 

 several thousands a generation from medioc- 

 rity to eminence, but one is tempted to believe 

 that his real faith is in absolute achievement 

 and that he courageously makes an attack 

 upon the Galtonian hypothesis because he 

 misconceives it to limit absolute as well as 

 relative achievement. 



