160 On the Inheritance of the Mental and Moral Characters in Man 
and for the last forty years the intellectual classes of the nation, enervated by 
wealth or by love of pleasure, or following an erroneous standard of life, have ceased 
to give us in due proportion the men we want to carry on the ever-growing work 
of our empire, to battle in the fore-rank of the ever intensified struggle of nations. 
Do not let me close with too gloomy a note. I do not merely state our lack. 
I have striven by a study of the inheritance of the mental and moral characters in 
man to see how it arises, and to know the real source of an evil is half-way to 
finding a remedy. That remedy lies first in getting the intellectual section of our 
nation to realise that intelligence can be aided and be trained, but no training or 
education can create it. You must breed it, that is the broad result for state- 
craft which flows from the equality in inheritance of the psychical and the physical 
characters in man. 
Addendum, April, 1904. 
I hardly know whether it is needful to refer here to a i-ecent article by Mr C. Spearman in 
The American Journal of Psychology (Vol. xv. pp. 72 — 101), criticising my results for the 
similarity of inheritance in the physical and psychical characters. Without waiting to read my 
paper in full he seems to think that I must have disregarded "homo influences" and the 
personal equation of the school teacher. He proceeded to ' correct ' my results for the error of 
what he calls dilation on the double basis (i) of a formula invented by himself, but given without 
jjroof, and (ii) of his own experience that two observers' observations or measurements of the 
same series of two characters were such that the correlation between their determinations was 
■58 in one case and '22 in the other. The formula invented by Mr Spearman for his so-called 
'dilation' is clearly wrong, for applied to perfectly definite cases, it gives values greater than 
unity for the correlation coefficient. As to his second basis, all I can say is that if the correlation 
between two observers of the same thing in Mr Spearman's case can be as low as '22, he must 
have employed most incomiietent observers, or given them most imperfect instructions, or 
chosen a character suitable for random guessing rather than observation in the scientific sense. 
Mr Spearman says that "it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the remarkable coincidence 
announced between physical and mental heredity can be more than mere accidental comcidence " 
(p. 98). I think I may safely leave him to calculate the odds for or against this most remarkable 
" mere accidental coincidence." I may take occasion later to return to Mr Spearman's paj^er, 
but at present it may suffice to say that not only are his formulae, esj^ecially for i^robable errors, 
erroneous, but he quite misunderstands and misuses partial correlation coefficients (p. 95). 
Further his statements as to the number of cases desirable for an experiment would be extremely 
dangerous, if they were in the least likely to be generally regarded. In particular one can only 
pillory such an assertion as that " It was shown in the same part that the size of the probable 
error also varies according to the method of calculation —and to such an extent that twenty 
cases treated in one of the ways described [Mr Spearman's own new method] furnish as much 
certitude as 180 in another more usual way" (p. 100). Perhaps the best thing at present would 
be for Mr Spearman to write a pajier giving algebraical proofs of all the formulae he has used, 
and if he did not discover their erroneous character in the process, he would at least provide 
tangible material for definite criticism, which it is difficult to apply to mere unproven assertions. 
