NEO-DARWINIAN SOCIOLOGISTS 95 



medical inspection in schools both in England and America as to 

 be of negative value. 



Other of the studies are of far greater value, as those concerning 

 the influence of alcohol on heredity ' but even these are not con- 

 clusive, except as indicating with a good degree of certainty that 

 chronic alcoholism is more or less a symptom of germinal defect. 2 



The general conclusion of all the laboratory investigations is to 

 the effect that mental and moral traits, as well as physical, includ- 

 ing insane and tubercular diathesis, are inheritable in about the 

 same ratio, 3 and that heredity is vastly more important than 

 environment. 4 The writer goes so far, even, as to hold that 

 medical progress, by suspending the operation of natural selection 

 by prolonging the lives of those who otherwise would have been 

 " selected," has weakened the average quality of the race-stock, 5 

 and that this tendency can be counteracted only by national 

 eugenics. 



Mr. Galton wrote his Hereditary Genius from the point of view 

 of Darwin's theories of natural selection, pangenesis and the 

 inheritance of acquired characters, but later accepted the teach- 

 ings of Weismann. Pearson, in his Grammar of Science, makes 

 room for other factors in race-stock improvement besides natural 

 selection, 6 but in his more recent writings he, too, has become a 



1 Memoirs, nos. x and xiii. 



* For sane criticism see Charity Organization Review, September, 1910. 



3 Lecture Series, no. ii, p. 20. How a moral trait can be inherited is not made 

 clear. There is a strong tendency in modern psychology and ethics to repudiate 

 the old teaching concerning a " moral sense." Biology has not yet revealed the 

 possibility of inheriting anything that cannot be reduced to terms of the physical 

 (including the nervous system). If there be innate moral traits they must be a 

 function of the nervous system. The nearest approach that modern psychology 

 can make is in its assumption of a gregarious or social instinct, and possibly of an 

 instinct that leads one to do as others do. Recent studies of juvenile delinquency 

 have failed to find any specific inheritance of criminal tendencies, and criminal 

 psychologists are now questioning the existence of the class of so-called " moral 

 delinquents." Cf. Healey, The Individual Delinquent. 



* " We find that the effect of nurture is on the average hardly one-fifth to one- 

 tenth that of heredity." — Lecture Series, no. vii, p. 7. Yet in no case has the 

 factor of heredity been kept entirely separate from early home training except in 

 Galton's study of twins. Cf. Ward's Applied Sociology. 



6 Lecture Series, no. ix, p. 19. 



6 Grammar of Science, p. 378. Cf. concluding chapter of this volume. 



