HM
58

UC-NRLF

CO

1 _l3

o

NATIONAL LIFE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE

New and Enlarged Edition
Demy 8vo., cloth, price 73. 6d. net.

THE ETHIC OF FREETHOUQHT
AND OTHER ADDRESSES AND ESSAYS

Second Edition, revised
Demy 8vo., cloth, price 73. 6d. net.

NATIONAL LIFE

FROM THE STANDPOINT OF
SCIENCE

BY

KARL PEARSON, F.R.S.

PROFESSOR OF APPLIED MATHEMATICS, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON

SECOND EDITION

LONDON

ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1905

f'

Go
W. F. R. WELD ON, F.R.S.,

Linacre Professor of Comparative Anatomy
in the University of Oxford.

A SLIGHT TOKEN OF GRATITUDE FOR ALL THAT

I HAVE LEARNT FROM HIM DURING THE

YEARS OF OUR FRIENDSHIP.

381772

PREFATORY NOTE

THIS lecture was delivered in Newcastle on
November 19, 1900, to the members of the
Literary and Philosophical Society. At the
time of writing and delivering it the South
African War and its lessons were far more
omnipresent in thought and feeling than,
perhaps unfortunately, they are to-day. The
wave of emotion which for a time roused
the nation to self-consciousness has passed,
scouring out very little of our stagnant back-
waters in the process. It is possibly with a
nation as with an individual — both feel only
intensely and are only capable of vigorous
self-reform in moments of unwonted stress,
or of novel spiritual experience. Still, in

vii

viii Prefatory Note

quieter moments it is worth while endeav-
ouring to bring home to the thoughtful that
no community of men can trust blindly to
heredity to preserve their racial characters.
Every nation is an agglomeration of good
and bad elements, and each new generation
is born from but a relatively small portion of
the whole. The greatness of a nation de-
pends on the dominant fertility of its fitter
stocks, and fluctuates with the extent of this
dominance. Love of ease, a mistaken sense
of duty, insidious new social habits, may
tamper with the preponderating fertility of
the fitter and more capable racial constituents
before we have realized their effects. Some
only of these things can be touched by the
legislator ; in the aggregate they are subject
alone to social feeling and to an enlightened
national pride. Is it possible to arouse a
consciousness in the folk that the parentage
of the next generation is not a personal but a
national problem ? — that a nation which has

Prefatory Note ix

ceased to insure that its better elements have
a dominant fertility has destroyed itself far
more effectually than its foes could ever hope
to destroy it in the battlefield ?

If the reprint of this lecture, of which the
first edition has been for some time exhausted,
should in the least help to quicken public
opinion on this all-important point, then its
purpose will have been amply fulfilled. The
topic is a complex and weighty one, and my
address was only a hasty talk, and not a
treatise providing elaborate investigation and
statistical proof of its statements. Still, most
of its unproved assertions are based on
results which the author has elsewhere pub-
lished, or for which he has unpublished
statistical warranty. But he would ask his
readers to take nothing on faith; he would
beg them solely to realize that there is a
problem of the most urgent national im-
portance involved in the mere possibility
that while modern social conditions are re-

x Prefatory Note

moving the crude physical checks which the
unrestrained struggle for existence places on
the over-fertility of the unfit, they may at the
same time be leading to a lessened relative
fertility in those physically and mentally
fitter stocks, from which the bulk of our
leaders in all fields of activity have hitherto
been drawn.

To the lecture is added an Appendix con-
taining two recent letters to the Times
dealing with the problem of National
Deterioration. I have to acknowledge the
ready consent of the Times management to
their republication.

K. P.

NATIONAL LIFE

FROM THE STANDPOINT OF
SCIENCE

IN the fore-part of this year,* when I was
asked to give a lecture in Newcastle, the
minds of men were not inclined to be in-
terested in the fascinating problems of pure
science. The spirits of one and all, what-
ever their political party or their opinions on
the rights or wrongs of British action in
South Africa might be, were depressed in a
manner probably never before experienced
by those of our countrymen now living. We
can, in the light of what has happened since,
afford, perhaps, to admit the truth now. We
had been defeated, I may even venture to

* 1900.
ii

12 National Life

badly defeated, by a social organism far
less highly developed and infinitely smaller
than our own. We felt like the giant be-
wildered, not by the strength, but by the
skill and ingenuity, of our opponent. We
had lost the power of foreseeing, and our
soldiers the power of adapting themselves to
a change of environment. We had to learn
from our foe the very armament suitable to
the conditions ; we had to learn that guns of
great calibre could be taken into the field
and, what is more, withdrawn from it; we
had to learn the arts of making and of taking
shelter ; we had to learn the existence of
something which was neither cavalry nor
mounted infantry ; we, a nation of horse-
breeders and horse-riders, had to learn the
right horse for a rough country and the
right manner of handling him ; nay, to some
troops we even issued a new rifle, and let
them practically gain their first experience
of it in the field. We, no doubt, felt in
those days of depression that we should
learn, or partially learn, all this, and per-
haps more ; we hoped, with a distinguished
statesman, that we should 'muddle through

from the Standpoint of Science 13

somehow.' We refrained, if not completely,
yet fairly successfully, from making scape-
goats.

But those who saw beyond the immediate
national danger were filled with a more abid-
ing sense of risk. They recognised that the
struggle for existence among nations will
not necessarily be settled in favour of the
biggest nation, nor in favour of the best-
armed nation, nor in favour of the nation
with the greatest material resources. I speak
not only of war, but of the more silent, but
none the less intense, struggle of peace — the
struggle for trade, for commercial supremacy,
for new sources of food supply, for mineral
wealth, and for the raw materials of manu-
facture. Size and armament and material
prosperity, of course, all tell ; hardihood,
bravery, and endurance all tell too, although
not so overwhelmingly as in the days of
Queen Bess. But none of these alone will
suffice. Here are the flesh, blood, and
sinews of a nation, but to make it foremost
in the struggle, to make it a homogeneous,
highly-organized whole, you must have a
complex nervous system, the reflex actions

14 National Life

of which are not merely automatic, but under
the control of that classified experience which
we term wisdom.

We all know how to act in our wonted j
circumstances, under our usual environment : !
our reactions are almost automatic ; but given
new circumstances and an unusual environ-
ment, then prompt action means foresight,
training, that rapid application of the truths
learned from past experience to new facts
which from various standpoints in life we
call ingenuity, business-habit, scientific in-
sight, wisdom, or, even more comprehensively,
brains. What is here said of an individual
is true of a nation. The nation, however
prosperous, however hardy, however big,
will fail when it comes to a crisis, when it
is suddenly placed in a new environment,
unless it has organized brain-power control-
ling its nervous system right away to the
smallest outlying points. Hardihood, big
battalions, command of the purse, may en-
able us to struggle through in either peace
or war so long as we have only to meet
small or semi-organized opponents, but they
will not avail when great nation meets great

from the Standpoint of Science 15

nation ; then it is the codified experience
and the organized brain-power which tell in
the struggle.*

It was consciousness of this lack of real
insight — not in one, but in many depart-
ments of national life — which gave an abiding
gloom to the depression arising from our
difficulties at the commencement of the year.
It was not only the need of * somehow
muddling through ' this matter, but the
problem of how we were to provide against
graver crises in the future, which depressed
many. How was the nation's own fault to be
brought home to it? How could it become a
more highly-organized whole, profiting to the
full by such brains as our race possesses ?
Such thoughts as these, rather than the
purely intellectual problems of science, filled
my mind when your invitation to lecture in
Newcastle reached me, and they led me
more or less directly to try and emphasize
the national value of science.

* A further great object-lesson in these truths has
been since provided by the war in the Far East. But
we have been slow to realize the close resemblance
between the sources of our own and of the Russian
failure.

1 6 National Life

From the standpoint of science there are
two questions we can, or, rather, we must,
ask. First : What, from the scientific stand-
point, is the function of a nation ? What
part from the natural history aspect does the
national organization play in the universal
struggle for existence ? And, secondly, What
has science to tell us of the best methods of
fitting the nation for its task ?

To answer at all effectually the latter
question, we must first consider what is the
proper answer to be given to the former.
I shall therefore endeavour to lay in broad
outlines before you what I hold to be the
scientific view of a nation, and of the re-
lationship of nations to each other. If at
the very offset my statements strike you as
harsh, cold, possibly immoral, I would ask
you to be patient with me to the end, when
some of you may perceive that the public
conscience, the moral goodness which you
value so highly, is established by science on
a firmer and more definite, if a narrower^
foundation than you are wont to suppose.

I want you to look with me for awhile on
mankind as a product of Nature, and sub-

from the Standpoint of Science 17

ject to the natural influences which form its
environment. I will, first, notice a point
which bears upon man as upon all forms of
animal life. The characters of both parents —
their virtues, their vices, their capabilities,
their tempers, their diseases — all devolve in
due proportion upon their children. Some
may say, ' Oh yes ; but we know such things
are inherited/ I fear that the great majority
of the nation does not realize what inheritance
means, or much that happens now would not
be allowed to happen. Our knowledge of
heredity has developed enormously in the
last few years ; it is no longer a vague factor
of development, to be appealed to vaguely.
Its intensity in a great variety of characters
in a great many forms of life has been
quantitatively determined, and we no longer
stand even where we did ten years ago.
The form of a man's head, his stature, his
eye-colour, his temper, the very length of his
life, the coat colour of horses and dogs, the
form of the capsule of the poppy, the spine
of the water- flea — these and other things are
all inherited, and in approximately the same
manner. Nay, if we extend the notion of

2

1 8 National Life

like producing like, we shall find, as I have
recently done, that the same laws are probably
true for the mushroom and for the forest
tree ; that the principle of heredity runs with
certainly no weakened intensity from the
lowest to the highest organisms, and from
their least to their most important characters.
Now, let us try to understand exactly what
this means. Of a definite child of A and B
we can assert nothing with certainty, but of
all the children of a definite class of parents
like A and B we can assert that a definite
proportion will have a definite amount of
any character of A and B with a certainty as
great as that of any scientific prediction what-
ever. I am not speaking from belief or from
theory, but simply from facts, from thousands
of instances recorded by my fellow-workers
or myself. Here is a great principle of life,
something apparently controlling all life from
its simplest to its most complex forms, and
yet, though we too often see its relentless
effects, we go on hQgjng that at any rate we
and our offspring shall be the exceptions to
its rules. For one of us as an individual
this may be true, but f^ the average of us

from the Standpoint of Science 19

all, for the nation as a whole, it is an idle
hope. You cannot change the leopard's
spots, and you cannot change bad stock to
good ; you may dilute it, possibly spread it
over a wider area, spoiling good stock, but
until it ceases to multiply it will not cease
to be. A physically and mentally well-ordered
individual will arise as a variation in bad
stock, or possibly may result from special
nurture, but the old evils will in all proba-
bility reappear in a definite percentage of
the offspring.

I know of the case of just such a good
variation appearing in a certain bad stock as
far back as 1680, and the offspring of which
married in the early eighteenth century into a
number of good stocks, several of which we
can trace in the records of the religious com-
munity of which they were members for
nearly 150 years. And what do we find ? In
each generation the same sort of proportion
of cases of drunkenness, insanity, and physical
breakdown arising to distress and perplex
their kinsfolk.

Now, if we once realize that this law of
inheritance is as inevitable as the law of

2 — 7

20 National Life

gravity, we shall cease to struggle against
it. This does not mean a fatal resignation
to the presence of bad stock, but a conscious
attempt to modify the percentage of it in our
own community and in the world at large.
Let me illustrate what I mean. A showman
takes a wolf and, by aid of training and
nurture, a more or less judicious administra-
tion of food and whip, makes it apparently
docile and friendly as a dog. But one day,
when the whip is not there, it is quite possible
that the wolf will turn upon its keeper, or
upon somebody else. Even if it does not,
its offspring will not benefit by the parental
education. I don't believe that the showman's
way can be a permanent success ; I believe,
however, that you might completely domesti-
cate the wolf, as the dog has been domesti-
cated, by steadily selecting the more docile
members of the community through several
generations, and breeding only from these,
rejecting the remainder. Now, if you have
once realized the force of heredity, you will
see in natural selection — the choice of the
physically and mentally fitter to be the
parents of the next generation — a most

from the Standpoint of Science 21

munificent provision for the progress of all
forms of life. Nurture and education may
immensely aid the social machine, but they
must be repeated generation by generation ;
they will not in themselves reduce the ten-
dency to the production of bad stock. Con-
scious or unconscious selection can alone
bring that about.

What I have said about bad stock seems to
me to hold for the lower races of man. How
many centuries, how many thousand of years,
have the Kaffir or the negro held large
districts in Africa undisturbed by the white
man ? Yet their intertribal struggles have
not yet produced a civilization in the least
comparable with the Aryan. Educate and
nurture them as you will, I do not believe
that you will succeed in modifying the stock.
History shows me one way, and one way
only, in which a high state of civilization has
been produced, namely, the struggle of race
with race, and the survival of the physically
and mentally fitter race. If you want to
know whether the lower races of man can
evolve a higher type, I fear the only course
is to leave them to fight it out among

22 National Life

themselves, and even then the struggle for
existence between individual and individual,
between tribe and tribe, may not be sup-
ported by that physical selection due to a
particular climate on which probably so much
of the Aryan's success depended.

If you bring the white man into contact
with the black, you too often suspend the
very process of natural selection on which
the evolution of a higher type depends. You
get superior and inferior races living on the
same soil, and that coexistence is demoraliz-
ing for both. They naturally sink into the
position of master and servant, if not ad-
mittedly or covertly into that of slave-owner
and slave. Frequently they intercross, and
if the bad stock be raised the good is lowered.
Even in the case of Eurasians, of whom I
have met mentally and physically fine speci-
mens, I have felt how much better they would
have been had they been pure Asiatics or pure
Europeans. Thus it comes about that when
the struggle for existence between races is
suspended, the solution of great problems
may be unnaturally postponed ; instead of the
slow, stern processes of evolution, cataclysmal

from the Standpoint of Science 23

solutions are prepared for the future. Such
problems in suspense, it appears to me, are
to be found in the negro population of the
Southern States of America, in the large ad-
mixture of Indian blood in some of the South
American races, but, above all, in the Kaffir
factor in South Africa.

You may possibly think that I am straying
from my subject, but I want to justify natural
selection to you. I want you to see selection
as something which renders the inexorable
law of heredity a source of progress which'
produces the good through suffering, an in-
finitely greater good which far outbalances the
very obvious pain and evil. Let us suppose
the alternative were possible. Let us suppose
we could prevent the white man, if we liked,
from going to lands of which the agricul-
tural and mineral resources are not worked »
to the full ; then I should say a thousand
times better for him that he should not go
than that he should settle down and live
alongside the inferior race. The only healthy
alternative is that he should go and com-
pletely drive out the inferior race. That is
practically what the white man has done in

24 National Life

North America. We sometimes forget the
light that chapter of history throws on more
recent experiences. Some 250 years ago
there was a man who fought in our country
against taxation without representation, and
another man who did not mind going to
prison for the sake of his religious opinions.
As Englishmen we are proud of them both,
but we sometimes forget that they were both
considerable capitalists for their age, and
started chartered companies in another con-
tinent. Well, a good deal went on in the
plantations they founded, if not with their
knowledge, with that at least of their servants
and of their successors, which would shock us
all at the present day. But I venture to say
that no man calmly judging will wish either
that the whites had never gone to America,
or would desire that whites and Red Indians
were to-day living alongside each other as
negro and white in the Southern States, as
Kaffir and European in South Africa, still
less that they had mixed their blood as
Spaniard and Indian in South America. The
civilization of the white man is a civilization
dependent upon free white labour, and when

from the Standpoint of Science 25

that element of stability is removed it will
collapse like those of Greece and Rome. I
venture to assert, then, that the struggle for
existence between white and red man, painful
and even terrible as it was in its details, has
given us a good far outbalancing its immediate
evil. In place of the red man, contributing
practically nothing to the work and thought
of the world, we have a great nation, mistress
of many arts, and able, with its youthful im-
agination and fresh, untrammelled impulses, to
contribute much to the common stock of civil-
ized man. Against that we have only to put
the romantic sympathy for the Red Indian
generated by the novels of Cooper and the
poems of Longfellow, and then — see how
little it weighs in the balance ! *

But America is but one case in which we
have to mark a masterful human progress
following an inter-racial struggle. The Aus-
tralian nation is another case of great civil-
ization supplanting a lower race unable to work
to the full the land and its resources. Further
back in history you find the same tale with
almost every European nation. Sometimes
when the conquering race is not too diverse

26 National Life

in civilization and in type of energy there is
an amalgamation of races, as when Norman
and Anglo-Saxon ultimately blended ; at
other times the inferior race is driven out
before the superior, as the Celt drove out the
Iberian. The struggle means suffering,
intense suffering, while it is in progress ; but
that struggle and that suffering have been
the stages by which the white man has
reached his present stage of development,
and they account for the fact that he no
longer lives in caves and feeds on roots and
nuts. This dependence of progress on the
survival of the fitter race, terribly black as it
' may seem to some of you, gives the struggle
for existence its redeeming features ; it is the
fiery crucible out of which comes the finer
metal. You may hope for a time when the
sword shall be turned into the ploughshare,
when American and German and English
traders shall no longer compete in the markets
of the world for their raw material and for
their food supply, when the white man and
the dark shall share the soil between them,
and each till it as he lists. But, believe me,
when that day comes mankind will no longer

from the Standpoint of Science 27

progress ; there will be nothing to check the
fertility of inferior stock ; the relentless law
of heredity will not be controlled and guided
by natural selection. Man will stagnate ;
and unless he ceases to multiply, the catas-
trophe will come again ; famine and pesti-
lence, as we see them in the East, physical
selection instead of the struggle of race
against race, will do the work more relent-
lessly, and, to judge from India and China,
far less efficiently than of old.

Let us face this question of increasing
population boldly. We cannot escape it.
Sooner or later it must and will make itself
felt in every progressive nation ; for what I
have said of the struggle of race against race
makes itself again felt within every commu-
nity. A nation like the French can largely
limit the number of its offspring, but how
shall we be sure that these offspring are from
the better and not from the inferior stock ? If
they come equally from both stocks and there
be no wastage, then the nation has ceased to
progress ; it stagnates. I feel sure that a
certain amount of wastage is almost neces-
sary for a progressive nation ; you want

2 8 National Life

definite evidence that the inferior stocks are
not able to multiply at will, that a certain
standard of physique and brains are needful
to a man if he wishes to settle and have a
family,

Mr. Francis Galton has suggested that we
might progress far more rapidly than we at
present do under this crude system of un-
conscious wastage if we turned our thoughts
more consciously to the problem, if we em-
phasized the need of social action in this
direction, and made men and women feel the
importance of good parentage for the citizens
of the future. But I fear our present
economic and social conditions are hardly
yet ripe for such a movement ; the all-im-
portant question of parentage is still largely
felt to be solely a matter of family, and not
of national importance. Yet how anti-
social such a view may be can be easily
realized. From the standpoint of the nation
we want to inculcate a feeling of shame in
the parents of a weakling, whether it be
mentally or physically unfit. We want
parents to grasp that they have given birth to
a new citizen, and that this involves, on the

from the Standpoint of Science 29

one hand, a duty towards the community in
respect of his breed and nurture, and a claim,
on the other hand, of the parents on the
State that the latter shall make the condi-
tions of life favourable to the rearing of
healthy, mentally vigorous men and women.
Bear in mind that one quarter only of the
married people of this country — say, a sixth to
an eighth of the adult population — produce
50 per cent, of the next generation. You
will then see how essential it is for the main-
tenance of a physically and mentally fit race
that this one-sixth to one-eighth of our
population should be drawn from the best
and not the worst stocks. A nation that
begins to tamper with its fertility may un-
consciously have changed its national charac-
teristics before two generations have passed.
France is becoming a land of Bretons
because the Bretons alone have large families.
And what about England ? The average net
size of our families has been falling for per-
haps fifty years. Who will venture to assert
that this decreased fertility has occurred in
the inferior stocks ? On the contrary, is it
not the feckless and improvident who have

30 National Life

the largest families ? The professional
classes, the trading classes, the substantial
and provident working classes — shortly, the
capable elements of the community with a
certain standard of life — have been marrying
late, and have been having small families ;
they have been increasing their individual
comfort. All this is at the expense of
• the nation's future. We cannot suspend the
struggle for existence in any class of the
community without stopping progress; we can-
not recruit the nation from its inferior stocks
without deteriorating our national character.

Now, what have our economic conditions
in England been during the last thirty years ?
The accumulation of wealth has been such
at one end of society that no test of brains
or of physique was needful before a man
multiplied his type. Death duties and the
inherent tendency of folly to squander its
substance were only very inefficient, very
partial, checks on the endowment in perpe-
tuity of the brainless. At the other end of
society we allowed a condition of affairs to
exist in which no greater discomfort could
well be produced by the introduction of

from the Standpoint of Science 31

additional human beings ; thfere were always
charity and the State ready to provide, more
or less inefficiently, for the surplus popula-
tion. There has been scarcely any check on
the multiplication of inferior stock ; only in
the middle ranks, among the more sub-
stantial workers with the hand and the head,
have men regarded the number of their off-
spring and made success in life's struggle to
some extent a condition of their multiplica-
tion.

Now, surely this is a very dangerous state
of affairs for the nation at large. A crisis
may come in which we may want all the
brain and all the muscle we can possibly lay
our hands on, and we may find that there is
a dearth of ability and a dearth of physique,
because we have allowed inferior stock to
multiply at the expense of the better. There
are occasions when a nation wants a reserve
of strong men, and when it must draw brain
and muscle from classes and from forms of
work wherein they are not exercised to the
full. And in that day woe to the nation
which has recruited itself from the weaker
and not from the stronger stocks ! If you

32 National Life

have not the means to start all your offspring
in your ovv; ^*, let them do the work of
another; if you cannot make them into lawyers
and engineers, let them be village school-
masters and mechanics. Or, if this sugges-
tion raise an insurmountable, if utterly false,
shame, let them go to new lands even as
miners, cowboys, and storekeepers ; they
will strengthen the nation's reserve, and this
is far better than that they should never
have existed at all.

I will not say that we have a dearth of
ability and of physique at this time, but I
will venture to assert that there has, of recent
years, been a want of them in the right places,
and that last year, but for the reserve of
strong men in our colonies, we should have
been in far greater difficulties than we were.
It is not only in warfare — that is the crudest
form of the modern struggle of nations — but
in manufacture and in commerce that there
has been a want of brains in the right place.
Leadership in trade is really no more than
leadership in the army open to the man of
brains ; in both cases it becomes a question
of wealth ; the endowed but brainless get the

from the Standpoint of Science 33

start. Consider, again, how the led are, in
many cases, not the mentally and physically
best for the task : they are too often the
surplus of the inferior stocks. What wonder
when we put the one in competition with the
brains and training of the German com-
mercial and technical houses we meet defeat !
What wonder that, when we take the other
out of its environment, the leaders cannot
lead, and the led fall an easy prey to sickness
and disease ? The regiment which has
marched farthest and has marched quickest,
which has suffered little from disease and
fought as well as any in the Transvaal, is
a volunteer regiment, drawn from that very
reserve of strength in the better stocks to
which I have referred.

In industry it is the same thing. We
shall do no good against the American and
the German by a mere multiplication of
centres of technical instruction. What we
want to do is to bring brains into our in-
dustry from top to bottom. Where the
brains already exist, there training will work
wonders ; but we shall not make the product
of inferior stock capable men by merely

34 National Life

teaching them the tricks of their trade. In
one polytechnic I found lads learning how
to fold cretonnes and polish mahogany ; that
is to say, the manufacturers had thrust the
cost of apprenticeship on the public purse,
perhaps to some extent lowering the price
of sofas and easy-chairs to those who cafe
about them. The object of any technical
education paid for by the State or tfie muni-
cipality should be the exercise of brain-power,
mental gymnastics in the best sense ; it
should treat of the science, and not the art,
of a trade. Such education — education, re-
member, means literally a drawing out, not
a cramming in — ought to act as a brain-
stretcher, and not attempt to communicate
mere trade knowledge. Where it does the
latter — and in how many cases does it not,
under our brand-new system of technical
instruction ? — then it is merely relieving the
manufacturers, and possibly the purchasers,
of certain goods of such part of their cost as
has hitherto been paid for apprenticeship.
On the other hand, when technical education
acts as a brain-stretcher, then this increased
efficiency tells not only on the trade occupa-

from the Standpoint of Science 35

tions, but on the social and civic life of the
educated ; the nation is thereby strengthen-
ing the reserve of trained brains upon which
it can draw in a crisis for all sorts of other
functions than those of a narrow trade.
Brain -stretching fosters an adaptability to
new environments. This is something very
different to a more complete knowledge of
trade processes or to proficiency in a special
handicraft. This is a form of education for
which the nation may legitimately pay ; it is
that which is essential to it in the struggle
for existence.

I am not speaking without some ex-
perience. I have been engaged for twenty
years in helping to train engineers, and those
of my old pupils who are now coming to the
front in life are not those who stuck to facts
and formulae, and sought only for what they
thought would be * useful to them in their
profession/ On the contrary, the lads who
paid attention to method, who thought more
of proofs than of .formulae, who accepted even
the specialized branches of their training as
a means of developing habits of observation
rather than of collecting * useful facts,' these

3—2

36 National Life

lads have developed into men who are suc-
ceeding in life. And the reason of this seems
to me, when considering their individual
cases, to be that they could adapt themselves
to an environment more or less different
from that of the existing profession ; they
could go beyond its processes, its formulae
and its facts, and develop new ones. Their
knowledge of method and their powers of
observation enabled them to supply new
needs, to answer to the call when there was
a demand, not for old knowledge, but for
trained brains.

Here, I think, is the point where we
reach the second great function of science in
national life. The first function is to show \
us what national life means, and how tti£
nation is a vast organism subject as much to
the great forces of evolution as any other
gregarious type of life. There is a struggle
of race against race and of nation against
nation. In the early days of that struggle it
was a blind, unconscious struggle of barbaric
tribes. At the present day, in the case of
the civilized white man, it has become more
and more the conscious, carefully directed

from the Standpoint of Science 37

attempt of the nation to fit itself to a con-
tinuously changing environment. The nation
has to foresee how and where the struggle
will be carried on ; the maintenance of
national position is becoming more and more
a conscious preparation for changing con-
ditions, an insight into the needs of coming
environments.

This is the second important duty of
"science in relation to national life. It has
to develop our brain-power by providing a
training in method, and by exercising our
powers of cautious observation. It has to
teach not only the leaders of our national
life, but the people at large, to prepare for
and meet the difficulties of new environments.
This is the only sort of technical education
the nation ought to trouble about, the teach-
ing people to see and to think. It is not
the art of a particular trade which we want
to teach in the schools, but the power of
observing and reasoning upon observation.

There is a most simple description of true
science which is embraced in the words :
Keep your eyes open and apply common-sense.
That is the keynote to the conduct of the

38 National Life

geologist who has roughly sketched the
history of many thousand years as he walked
across the downs with you, of the engineer
who rapidly reports on a new country, of
the doctor who forms rapid diagnoses as
he paces the hospital ward ; it is trained
observation applied to physical and human
nature. There is a very excellent little
book which many of you may have read
recently, Baden Powell's ' Aids to Scout-
ing ' ; it is a capital introduction to the
true scientific method. The man with a
scientific training scouts through Nature,
including under nature mankind itself. You
may sum up his conduct just as I think
Baden Powell's booklet may be summed up
— Keep your eyes open and apply common-
sense. What we as a nation seem to want
at the present time is precisely what its
commander complained of our army needing
in Natal — scouting. I take it that the success
of German technical instruction is just pro-
portional to its efficiency in producing trained
scouts. We have only just started our
technical schools, but I sadly fear they are
not putting sufficient stress on scouting, on

from the Standpoint of Science 39

teaching how to observe and how to reason
on observation as distinct from a knowledge
of facts, or from a training in art or handicraft.
Mechanical skill, the trick of the trade, may
be learn^best in the workshop ; facts and
formulae may be found in books ; pro-
cesses followed in the foundry and the
weaving-shed in a manner that can only be
mimicked in the schools ; but true scouting
can be learnt only from the master-scout.
And here arises the real value of a band
of men trained to observe and reason. This
is why we want scientific schools and men
of science if the nation is to maintain its
position.

If you turn in almost any direction, you
will see this want of trained scouts. We
want them in our diplomatic service to keep
their hand on the pulse of other nations ; we
want them in new countries to tell us of new
mineral and new food supplies ; we want
them, above all, in our trade, to tell us what
to make and how and where to send it ; we
want them to see what competitive nations
are doing, and to provide for our mercantile
marine, our railways, our manufactures being

40 National Life

maintained at the highest state of efficiency.
Shortly, we want scouting in all branches of
the national service ; we need men who will
observe what others are doing, who will seek
for new supplies, and push the nation and
prepare cautiously for its advance in every
way.

I will not underrate the importance of the
equipment of the scout. He undoubtedly
profits by technical knowledge. You cannot
send a man to push trade if he have no
knowledge of the language of the people he
has to deal with, or an engineer to discover
mineral resources without an elementary
acquaintance with geology. But I insist
that the trained mind is the first thing, and
for scouting a fool on horseback is worth less
than a wise man on foot. We are a wealthy
nation, and I fear we find it easier to provide
the equipment than to discover the master-
scout. I have yet to learn that the physicist
with palatial laboratory and elaborate and
costly implements will do more for his pupils
than the man with no instrument-maker
behind him. The biologist with his £80
microscopes and specimens drawn from the

from the Standpoint of Science 41

four quarters of the globe may teach less
than the field naturalist with the hedgerow
and the lens. One of the first lessons of
scouting is independence of equipment, the
doing of great things with small means ;
and magnificent equipment, the provision of
elaborate instruments and highly - trained
mechanicians, too often renders your man of
science and his pupils helpless in a less
palatial environment. We are not going to
get technical education by merely paying for
it./ We may show wonderful buildings,
dazzling equipments, a network of examina-
tions, and a crowd of certificated examinees,
but this will not insure the training the
nation wants in observation and in reasoning
on observation.

We must, above all, exercise the selective
faculty and choose true master-scouts, giving
them a free hand, and th<iy will teach our
lads to observe and think scientifically. That
is the only form of technical education which
will produce the scouting power the nation
needs. Some may say that this is pure
science, and not technical instruction at all.
I am not prepared to say it is not. I don't

42 National Life

care a rap, and don't believe anyone with
educational interests at heart does care a
rap, for the facts and formulae and results of
science being crammed into all classes of the
community ; they may be useful enough to
men of special trades and professions. But
what the nation does want in order to
strengthen its civil and commercial life is a
great increase in its powers of observation
in its knowledge of scientific method and of
the nature of scientific reasoning. The rest,
the greater efficiency in trade and handicraft,
will follow surely enough on that. Make
the man intellectually stronger, and he will
be a better soldier, a better trader, and a
better craftsman Teach the man how to
scout in the first place, and then he will
know for himself the sort of equipment he
wants and how it is to be provided. You
furnish a charger and a sword, where per-
adventure a pony and a hatchet are what the
trained scout would select for himself. Know-
ledge is the equipment which the trained
mind can find for itself, but the training is a
thing you have got to provide for it, and the
national value of science lies first in the

from the Standpoint of Science 43

training it can furnish, and only in the second
place in its practical results.

There has been far too much talk about
the national utility of science, and too little
stress laid on its educational value. ' I want
my son to learn what will be useful to him
in his profession in life ' is the statement I
have heard from one parent after another.
' I want my son to know how to observe and
to think ' is the expression of a desire which
I have not yet come across. This is the
spirit which has ruled the movement for
technical education ; but if this spirit is to
remain dominant, it will take a great deal to
get the nation out of its present ruts. What
we want are trained brains, scouts in all
fields, and not a knowledge of facts and
processes crammed into a wider range of
untrained minds.

It may be as well now to sum up my
position as far as I have yet developed it.
I have asked you to look upon the nation as
an organized whole in continual struggle with
other nations, whether by force of arms or
by force of trade and economic processes.
I have asked you to look upon this struggle

44 National Life

of either kind as a not wholly bad thing ; it
is the source of human progress throughout
the world's history. But if a nation is to
maintain its position in this struggle, it must
be fully provided with trained brains in every
department of national activity, from the
government to the factory, and have, if
possible, a reserve of brain and physique to
fall back upon in times of national crisis.
Recent events in our commercial as well as
in our military experience have led some to
doubt whether our supply of trained brains
is sufficient, or, at any rate, whether it is
available in the right place at the right
moment.

Those presumably who hold that the
brains are forthcoming have raised the cry
of technical instruction, which is to be a
remedy for our commercial difficulties. I
have little doubt that when this war is
finished the cry of military instruction will
be raised for our army difficulties. In the
latter as in the former case large sums of
money will no doubt be demanded for equip-
ment. But I have endeavoured to indicate^
that there are two preliminary matters to be

from the Standpoint of Science 45

considered. First, are we quite certain that
we have a reserve of brain power ready to
be trained ? We have to remember that
man is subject to the universal law of in-
heritance, and that a dearth of capacity may
arise if we recruit our society from the in-
ferior and not the better stock. If any social
opinions or class prejudices tamper with the
fertility of the better stocks, then the national
character will take but a few generations ,
to be seriously modified. The pressure of
population should always tend to push brains
and physique into occupations where they
are not a primary necessity, for in this way
a reserve is formed for the times of national
crisis. Such a reserve can always be formed
by filling up with men of our own kith and
kin the waste lands of the earth, even at the
expense of an inferior race of inhabitants.
Yet if we grant that our nation has a full
supply of brains both in action and in reserve,
it is not knowledge in the first place, but
intellectual training, which is requisite. We
want the master-scout to teach men to ob-
serve and reason on their observations, and
the equipment of the scout, the actual know-

46 National Life

ledge of facts and processes, is a minor
matter.

You will see that my view — and I think it
may be called the scientific view of a nation
— is that of an organized whole, kept up to a
high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring
that its numbers are substantially recruited
from the better stocks, and kept up to a high
pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly
by way of war with inferior races, and with
equal races by the struggle for trade-routes
and for the sources of raw material and of
food supply. This is the natural history view
of mankind, and I do not think you can in
its main features subvert it. Some of you
may refuse to acknowledge it, but you cannot
really study history and refuse to see its force.
Some of you may realize it, and then despair
of life ; you may decline to admit any glory
in a world where the superior race must
either eject the inferior, or, mixing with it, or
even living alongside it, degenerate itself.
What beauty can there be when the battle is
to the stronger, and the weaker must suffer
in the struggle of nations and in the struggle
of individual men ? You may say : Let us

from the Standpoint of Science 47

cease to struggle ; let us leave the lands of
the world to the races that cannot profit by
them to the full ; let us cease to compete in
the markets of the world. Well, we could
do it, if we were a small nation living on the
produce of our own soil, and a soil so worth-
less that no other race envied it and sought
to appropriate it. We should cease to ad-
vance ; but then we should naturally give up
progress as a good which comes through
suffering. I say it is possible for a small
rural community to stand apart from the
world-contest and to stagnate, if no more
powerful nation wants its possessions.

But are we such a community ? Is it not
a fact that the daily bread of our millions
of workers depends on their having some-
body to work for ? that if we give up the
contest for trade-routes and for free markets
and for waste lands, we indirectly give up our
food-supply ? Is it not a fact that our strength
depends on these and upon our colonies, and
that our colonies have been won by the ejec-
tion of inferior races, and are maintained
against equal races only by respect for the
present power of our empire? If war or

48 National Life

competition lessen the China trade, if a bad
harvest or a flood check the import of
Egyptian or American cotton, it is the
Lancashire operative who feels the pinch.
The day when we cease to hold our own
among the nations will be the day of catas-
trophe for our workers at home. We could
return to the condition of medieval England,
to the condition of Norway or Denmark, but
only by a process of intense selection, re-
ducing our millions in a manner which the
imagination refuses to contemplate. Being
as we are, we cannot give up the struggle,
and the moment dearth of ability, the want of
brains and physique in the right place, leads
to serious defeat, our catastrophe will come.
That is the vision which depressed thoughtful
men at the beginning of this year ; that is
the dread which must be ever in the mind of
the true statesman when he seeks, on the one
hand, to curb the rash venture which may
overstrain our power, and on the other hand,
to maintain our right to work the unutilized
resources of earth, be they in Africa or in
Asia.

Struggle of race against race, and of man

from the Standpoint of Science 49

against man — if this be the scientific view of
life, the basis of human progress — how have
human love and sympathy come to play such
a great part in the world? Here, again, I
think science has something to say, although
the earlier interpreters of evolution rather
obscured it. They painted evolution as the
survival of the fittest individual, and spoke
of his struggle against his fellows.

But this is not the only form of selection
at work ; it is often quite the least effective
phase of the contest. Consciously or uncon-
sciously, one type of life is fighting against a
second type, and all life is struggling with its
physical environment. The safety of a gre-
garious animal — and man is essentially such
— depends upon the intensity with which the
social instinct has been developed. The
stability of a race depends entirely on the
extent to which the social feelings have got
a real hold on it. The race which allows the
physically or mentally stronger Tom to make
the existence of the somewhat inferior Jack
impossible will never succeed when it comes
into contest with a second race. Jack has
no interests in common with Tom ; the op-

4

50 National Life

pressed will hardly get worse terms from a
new master. That is why no strong and
permanent civilization can be built upon
slave labour, why an inferior race doing
menial labour for a superior race can give
no stable community ; that is why we shall
never have a healthy social state in South
Africa until the white man replaces the dark
in the fields and in the mines, and the Kaffir
is pushed back towards the equator. The
nation organized for the struggle must be a
homogeneous whole, not a mixture of superior
and inferior races. For this reason every
new land we colonize with white men is a
source of strength ; every land of coloured
men we simply rule may be needful as a
source of food and mineral wealth, but it is
not an element of stability in our community,
and must ever be regarded with grave anxiety
by our statesmen.

This need for homogeneity in a nation
may be pushed further. We must not have
class differences and wealth differences and
education differences so great within the com-
munity that we lose the sense of common
interest, and feel only the pressure of the

from the Standpoint of Science 51

struggle of man against man. No tribe of
men can work together unless the tribal
interest dominates the personal and indi-
vidual interest at all points where they come
into conflict. The struggle among primitive
men of tribe against tribe evolved the social
instinct. The tribe with the greater social
feeling survived ; we have to thank the
struggle for existence for first making man
gregarious, and then intensifying, stage by
stage, the social feeling. Such is the scien-
tific account of the origin of our social in-

% stincts ; and if you come to analyze it, such is
the origin of what we term morality ; morality

« is only the developed form of the tribal habit, r

r

the custom of acting in a certain way towards j
our fellows, upon which the very safety of the ,
tribe originally depended. Philosophies may
be invented, the supersensuous appealed to,
in order to increase the sanctions on social
or moral conduct ; but the natural history of
morality begins with the kin-group, spreads to
the tribe, to the nation, to allied races, and
ultimately to inferior races and lower types of
life, but ever with decreasing intensity. The
demands upon the spirit of self-sacrifice which

4—2

52 National Life

can be made by our kin, by our countrymen,
by Europeans, by Chinamen, by Negroes and
by Kaffirs, by animals, may not be clearly de-
fined ; but, on the average, they admit of rough
graduation, and we find in practice, whatever
be our fine philosophies, that the instinct to
self-sacrifice wanes as we go down in the
scale.

The man who tells us that he feels to all
men alike, that he has no sense of kinship,
that he has no patriotic sentiment, that he
loves the Kaffir as he loves his brother, is
probably deceiving himself. If he is not,
then all we can say is that a nation of such
• men, or even a nation with a large minority
of such men, will not stand for many genera-
tions ; it cannot survive in the struggle of the
nations, it cannot be a factor in the contest
upon which human progress ultimately de-
pends. The national spirit is not a thing to
be ashamed of, as the educated man seems
occasionally to hold. If that spirit be the
mere excrescence of the music-hall, or an
ignorant assertion of superiority to the
foreigner, it may be ridiculous, it may even be
nationally dangerous ; but if the national

from the Standpoint of Science 53

spirit takes the form of a strong feeling of
the importance of organizing the nation as a
whole, of making its social and economic
conditions such that it is able to do its work
in the world and meet its fellows without
hesitation in the field and in the market, then
it seems to me a wholly good spirit — indeed,
one of the highest forms of social, that is,
moral instinct.

So far from our having too much of this
spirit of patriotism, I doubt if we have
anything like enough of it. We wait to
improve the condition of some class of
workers until they themselves cry out or
even rebel against their economic condition.
We do not better their state because we
perceive its relation to the strength and
stability of the nation as a whole. Too often
it is done as the outcome of a blind class war.
The coal-owners, the miners, the manu-
facturers, the mill-hands, the landlords, the
farmers, the agricultural labourers, struggle
by fair means, and occasionally by foul,
against each other, and, in doing so, against
the nation at large, and our statesmen as a
rule look on. That was the correct attitude

54 National Life

from the standpoint of the old political eco-
nomy. It is not the correct attitude from the
standpoint of science; for science realizes that
the nation is an organized whole, in continual >
struggle with its competitors. You cannot
get a strong and effective nation if many of
its stomachs are half fed and many of its
brains untrained. We, as a nation, cannot
survive in the struggle for existence if we
allow class distinctions to permanently endow
the brainless and to push them into posts of
national responsibility. The true statesman
has to limit the internal struggle of the com-
munity in order to make it stronger for the
external struggle. We must reward ability,
we must pay for brains, we must give larger
advantage to physique ; but we must not do
this at a rate which renders the lot of the
mediocre a wholly unhappy one. We must
foster exceptional brains and physique for
national purposes ; but, however useful prize-
cattle may be, they are not bred for their own
sake, but as a step towards the improvement
of the whole herd.

If I have put my position at all clearly,
you will see how the key to it lies in the

from the Standpoint of Science 55

gregarious nature of man. The older evolu-
tionists overlooked several of the factors of
the struggle for existence. They empha-
sized, in a way which now appears almost
absurd, the struggle of individual with in-
dividual. They do not appear to have
recognised that many of the characters
which give man his foremost place in the
animal kingdom were evoked in the struggle
of tribe against tribe, of race against race,
and even of man as a whole against other
forms of life and against his physical en-
vironment. Like the other political econo-
mists, they thought all real progress depended
upon an all-round fight within the community.
They forgot that the herd exists owing to
its social instincts, and that human sympathy
and racial and national feelings are strong
natural forces controlling individual conduct
and economic theories based purely on
questions of supply and demand. It is the
herd, the tribe, or the nation which forms the
fundamental unit in the evolution of man,
and it is to the leaders of the herd, or nation,
that we ought to look for conscious recogni-
tion of this fact.

56 National Life

If they are true statesmen, they ought not
merely to advance in the direction they may
be pushed by the immediate needs of one
overburdened class, or by the overloud cry
of another group dominant for the time being ;
they ought to look upon the community as
an organized whole, and treat class needs
and group cries from the standpoint of the
efficiency of the herd at large. , TTheir duty
is to lessen, if not to suspend, the internal
struggle, that the nation may be strong ex-
ternally. One point only is fundamental in
that suspension of the internal struggle, and
this holds for man as it holds for every
gregarious animal : social sympathy and
State aid must not be carried so far within
the community that the intellectually and
physically weaker stocks multiply at the
same rate as the better stocks.

The dearth of brains and the dearth of
physique are the worst misfortunes that can
befall a nation, and yet how many of our
rulers realize that brains and physique are not
things scattered at random among the popu-
lation, which they can lay their hands on when-
ever they need them ? Our legislators get

from the Standpoint of Science 57

wonderfully excited over laws t dating to
horses and cattle ; they devote money au^
time to breeding purposes, and realize the
strength of the laws of inheritance when they
endow national studs and give prizes to en-
courage the maintenance of good stock, or
when again they work for the establishment of
selected herds. But which of them has con-
sidered domestic legislation from the natural
history standpoint ? What statesman has re-
membered that in the character of the nationl
fertility of to-day is written the strength or
weakness of the nation to-morrow ? I
fear we leave these things to chance, or to
the caprice of individual selfishness. As
long as the social conditions were such that
the weak within the community were not
protected by the State ; as long as there
was no restriction on the fertility of the
better stocks, we might in a rough-and-
ready manner trust that our population would
be recruited from its fitter members, But
with the social movements of the present
day, the reduction in infantile mortality, prin-
cipally of the inferior stocks, the reduction
in the birth-rate, principally of the superior

i;8 National Life

stocks, science may well call the attention of
our rulers to a possible famine — a day when
we shall want brains and want physique, and
shall not find the necessary reserve of them.

Take the case of ability in particular.
Francis Galton has shown us that it largely
arises from special stocks ; but if those stocks
decrease their output, then by so much does
the rare chance of a man of marked ability
appearing grow rarer. Again, I repeat, we
may, after all, only want brains in the right
place. But besides the need of them in
South Africa, which was recently fairly
manifest, look to any branch of national life,
and may we not fear the dearth has already
begun ? Where are the young men in the
political world who can stir even a small
section of the community to united action ?
Where are the younger civil servants to
replace our dying proconsuls, the men to
whom the nation can commit with a feeling
of security and confidence the future problems
of South Africa itself? Where are the new
writers to whom the nation listens as it did to
Carlyle, Ruskin, and Browning ? or for whose
books it eagerly waits as it did for those

from the Standpoint of Science 59

of Thackeray and George Eliot ? Where are
the leaders of science who will make the
epoch that Darwin and Huxley made in
biology, or Faraday and Clerk Maxwell in
physics ? There may be steady average
ability, but where is the fire of genius,
the spirit of enthusiasm, which creates the
leader of men either in thought or
action ? Alas ! it is difficult to see any
light on the horizon predicting the dawn of
an intellectual renaissance, or heralding social
and political reforms such as carried the
nation through the difficult fifty years of the
middle of last century. Possibly our strong
men may have got into the wrong places.
Ability may have drifted onto the Stock
Exchange, the race-course, or the cricket-
field, for aught I can say to the contrary ;
but I must confess to feeling sometimes that
an actual dearth is upon us. And if this
should be so, then the unchangeable law of
heredity shows us only too clearly the chief
source of the evil : we have multiplied from
the inferior, and not from the superior stocks.
I have laid special stress on this point, for
I want to impress you with two aspects under

60 National Life

which science is of national value. The one
is as a great factor of education. On its
facts and its formulae I lay no weight ; you
will find them appraised — nay, overvalued —
by the modern apostles of technical instruc-
tion. But education is not a communication
of knowledge ; it is a drawing out and an
exercising of brain power. Here science —
true science, in the hands of the master-scout
— can teach us to observe and infer from
observation more readily and more effectively
than perhaps any other form of mental dis-
cipline. It is the trained scout in all fields
of our national activity that we need so
badly.

The other aspect from which science claims
national value is from the interpretation it
puts upon the functions and the historical
development of the community. It teaches
us to examine the efficiency of the nation
from the natural history standpoint. We find
that the law of the survival of the fitter is true
of mankind, but that the struggle is that of
the gregarious animal. A community not knit
together by strong social instincts, by sym-
pathy between man and man, and class and

from the Standpoint of Science 61

class, cannot face the external contest, the
competition with other nations, by peace
or by war, for the raw material of pro-
duction and for its food supply. This
struggle of tribe with tribe, and nation with
nation, may have its mournful side ; but we
see as a result of it the gradual progress of
mankind to higher intellectual and physical
efficiency. It is idle to condemm it ; we can
only see that it exists and recognise what
we have gained by it — civilization and social
sympathy. But while the statesman has to
watch this external struggle, to see that the
nation is really an organized whole, not a
loose agglomeration of hostile groups of men
seeking primarily their own profit and pleasure
at the national expense ; while he has to
check the internal struggle of man with man,
he must be very cautious that the nation is
not silently rotting at its core. He must
insure that the fertility of the inferior stocks
is checked, and that of the superior stocks
encouraged ; he must regard with suspicion
anything that tempts the physically and
mentally fitter men and women to remain
childless. He must see to it that a reserve

6 2 National Life

of brain and muscle is pushed down into
occupations which have little apparent need
of them, or forced into new lands — even at
the expense of inferior races. For upon this
reserve we shall surely have to fall back in
times of crisis — and such crises will come
in our lifetime, to judge by economic and
political history, which may far surpass in
magnitude even that of this year.* Shortly,
the statesman has to hold the balance be-
tween the strong social feelings upon which
are based the external success of the nation
and the crude natural check to the unlimited
multiplication of the unfit upon which the
internal soundness of the nation depends.
That is the great lesson we must learn from
natural selection and the law of inheritance
as applied to human communities.

I have endeavoured to place before you
a few of the problems which, it seems to me,
arise from a consideration of some of our
recent difficulties in war and in trade. Science
is not a dogma ; it has no infallible popes to
pronounce authoritatively what its teaching
is. I can only say how it seems to one in-
* 1900.

from the Standpoint of Science 63

dividual scientific worker that the doctrine
of evolution applies to the history of nations.
My interpretation way be wrong, but of the
true method I am sure : a community of
men is as subject as a community of ants or
as a herd of buffaloes to the laws which rule
all organic nature. We cannot escape from
them ; it serves no purpose to protest at what
some term their cruelty and their bloodthirsti-
ness. We can only study these laws, recognise
what of gain they have brought to man, and
urge the statesman and the thinker to regard
and use them, as the engineer and inventor
regard and then turn to human profit the
equally unchangeable laws of physical nature.
The origin of the world and the purport
of life are mysteries alike to the poet, the
theologian, and the man of science. One
who has stood somewhat as the mediator
between the three admitted the mystery,
saw the cruelty of natural processes when
judged from the relative standpoint of man,
but found therein an undefinable ' tendency
towards righteousness/ If by righteousness
he meant wider human sympathies, intenser
social instincts, keener pity, and clearer prin-

64 National Life

ciples of conduct, then I believe that ten-
dency, that continual progress of mankind,
is the scarcely recognised outcome of the
bitter struggle of race with race, the result
of man, like all other life, being subject to
the stern law of the survival of the fitter, to
the victory of the physically and mentally
better organized. Mankind as a whole, like
the individual man, advances through pain
and suffering only. The path of progress
is strewn with the wreck of nations ; traces
are everywhere to be seen of the hecatombs
of inferior races, and of victims who found
not the narrow way to the greater perfection.
Yet these dead peoples are, in very truth,
the stepping-stones on which mankind has
arisen to the higher intellectual and deeper
emotional life of to-day.

APPENDIX I

NATIONAL DETERIORATION

THE future of anthropology undoubtedly lies
in the application of the fundamental princi-
ples of natural selection to the problem of
man. With as little doubt the method of
that future will be the reconstruction of demo-
graphy and anthropometry by aid of modern
statistical theory. Examined from this
standpoint, there is little distinction between
scientific sociology and the anthropology
of the future. The growth and decay of
human societies is a chapter — for man, per-
haps, the most important chapter — in evolu-
tionary anthropology. When we have fully
grasped the significance of the fact that man
is essentially gregarious, and not single, the
study of international anthropometric and
vital statistics* becomes one with the study

* * Anthropometric ' and * vital ' are here used in their
broadest senses, and apply not only to statistics of the
relative fertility of nations and classes, of their relative
physique and endurance, but also to their general capacity
and intellectual power.

65 5

66 Appendix I

of natural selection in man. The lessons to
be deduced from censuses, registrar-general's
reports, anthropometric surveys, educational
returns of every type — when these are
efficiently and fully developed — become of
primary national importance, and will speak
imperatively in the near future to our more
thoughtful statesmen.

The struggle of classes and of individuals
within the community must be subservient
to the general fitness of the community as a
whole in its contest, in peace or war, with
other communities. From this standpoint
the patriotic feeling must not only be aroused
by such clear and obvious sources of national
deterioration as unhealthy dwellings and
factories, adulterated food, drink and over-
strain,* but also by those more subtle factors
of degeneration which can only be appreciated
by more elaborate statistical investigations.
Such factors may, indeed, be far more r^pid
in their effects than those which are more
obviously and tangibly present in the in-
dividual, and so at once attract the attention
of the social reformer. The one series affect
the population for the time being — there is
no evidence that they will be permanently
acquired by its offspring ; the other series
are to a much greater extent irreversible.

* The complacency which asserts that we are better
than our forefathers in these respects entirely overlooks
the real problem, which is centred in considering our
progress relative to other great nations.

National Deterioration 67

For good or evil, a slender Act of Parlia-
ment could exterminate in a generation the
thoroughbred racehorse in this country.
How long would it take to recreate the
stock without foreign importation ? We do
not want to depend on importation for our
brains and ability,* and on this ground alone
I would deprecate the tendency to pass by
more subtle factors of national deterioration,
because they require a little more thought
than more strident evils. To emphasize this
point I have republished the following letters,
although they are controversial in form.

The origin of the letters must be sought for
in a lecture before the Sanitary Inspectors*
Association, by Sir James Crichton-Browne.
In that lecture he was reported in the Times
of August 1 8, 1905, as saying :

* Professor Karl Pearson, a thoughtful and cautious
anthropologist, had told us that decadence of character
and of intelligent leadership was to be noted alike in the
British merchant, the professional man, and the work-
man, and this he attributed to the fact that the intellec-
tual classes were not reproducing their numbers as they
did fifty or one hundred years ago. In this view Professor
Pearson was supported by the Prime Minister, who said
at Cambridge last year that in the case of every man who
left the labouring class and became a member of the
middle or wealthier classes his progeny were likely to be
diminished owing to the fact that marriages were later in
that class. He was inclined to think, however, that

* A study to-day of surnames in the commercial direc-
tories of the cities of London and Manchester should
give rise to reflection.

5—2

68 Appendix I

intellectual decadence, if it be upon us, was not altogether
due to the causes assigned by Professor Pearson and
Mr. Balfour, and was not necessarily destined to deepen
as time went on. In a people like our own there was
always outside the actually intellectual class a still larger
class potentially intellectual with abilities incompletely
evolved, because never called forth, but capable under
stress of circumstances of the higher development. Many
of our finest intellectuals had sprung from the unintel-
lectual class, and genius was generally more or less of a
sport. His own view was that any dearth of ability from
which we might be suffering was to be ascribed not so
much to the infertility of the cultivated classes as to the
artificial production of stupidity in various ways, and to
the incessant draining from the country — which was the
I fit and proper breeding-place and rearing-ground of
intellect — of the best elements of our people to be
swallowed up or deteriorated in our big towns. \ Not
less untenable than the notion that the agricultural
labourer was dull of intellect was the idea that the city
urchin was cleverer and better endowed mentally than the
little yokel. The rule seemed to be that the mental
development of children was hastened by city life, but
soon stopped short. Up till thirteen or fourteen years
of age they were precocious, and then came to a stand-
still. City life at its best was bad for children, involving,
as it did, early puberty, exciting distraction, superficiality
of knowledge, insufficient repose, and the want of sooth-
ing influences that the country afforded ; and at its worst,
when it meant a tight squeeze in squalid dwellings, poor
food, foul air, contact with vice, and manifold tempta-
tions, it was utterly demoralizing. It seemed obvious
that, if the city went on growing at the nineteenth-century
rate, and under nineteenth-century conditions, it would
dry up the reservoirs of strength in the population and
leave an immense proletariat of inferior quality and
without commanders.'

These words seem to me to mark a case
in which a more subtle and dangerous factor

National Deterioration 69

of national deterioration is placed on one
side in order to emphasize the obvious, but,
I believe, far less permanent effects of urban
crowding on the individual, and they called
forth the following letter, published in the
Times of August 25 :

* In a recent address reported in the Times
of Friday last, Sir J. Crichton- Browne cited
a sentence from my Huxley Lecture of two
years ago with regard to our present national
dearth of ability. That same sentence was
placed by the chairman of the Committee on
Physical Deterioration before, not its author,
but Professor Cunningham, and he was asked
what my reasons for such an opinion might
be ; he replied that he knew none whatever.
Neither Professor Cunningham nor Sir James
Crichton-Browne have ventured to criticise
directly the detailed statistics which I have
published to support my conclusion, nor, as
far as I am aware, have they published any
mass statistics of their own in the least con-
futing those advanced by me. There are
several stages in the argument necessary to
establish my point, and perhaps, sir, you will
permit me space to restate them. They are
as follows :

1 1. What is the quantitative degree in
which the physical characters are inherited
in man ? This problem was solved by the
measurement of some 1,100 families — father,
mother, and adult offspring. The measure-

jo Appendix I

ments took some five or six years to com-
plete, and the results are set forth in a
memoir published in 1903. They involve
no physiological theory of heredity ; they
merely describe statistically the observed
quantitative resemblance between parents
and offspring, and, again, between members
of the same stock. The work was an
obvious, if necessary, continuation of Mr.
Francis Galton's researches.

'II. Are the mental and physical char-
acters inherited to the same extent ? The
answer to this question is given in the
Huxley Lecture of November, 1903 ; and it
is based on observations made on between
5,000 and 6,000 school-children. It is there
shown that the degree of resemblance of
members of the same stock for eight mental
and moral characters and for eight physical
characters in the case of pairs of brothers,
pairs of sisters, and pairs of sisters and
brothers is, within the errors of such an
investigation, sensibly identical. For the
first time we appear to have a quantitatively
sound basis for asserting that there is no dis-
tinction in the degree of inheritance between
the physical and the psychical. If this result
be true — and so far I have seen no statistical
data, only more or less dogmatic opinions,
quoted against it — it must follow that the
physically and mentally fitter stocks produce
physically and mentally fitter offspring. Sir
J. Crichton-Browne says : " Many of our

National Deterioration 71

finest intellectuals have sprung from the
unintellectual class, and genius is generally
more or less of a sport." Now, I have
personally been careful never in discussing
this subject to use the word "genius." The
term itself is vague, and the hard work of a
nation is carried on in the main by the able
and capable man, and not by vague "genius."
Capacity breeds capacity, whatever "genius"
may do. Now, taking the numbers actually
given by our statistics, What do we find ?
" That pairs of exceptional parents produce
exceptional sons at a rate more than ten
times as great as pairs of non-exceptional
parents. At the same time, eighteen times
as many exceptional sons are born to non-
exceptional as to exceptional parents, for the
latter form only about \ per cent, of the
community " (Phil. Trans ., vol. cxcv., p. 47,
1900). The word exceptional here repre-
sents a very high standard indeed. But
the mere fact that rare sons of commonplace
parents are more frequent than the usual sons
of rare parents explains the statement that
many of our finest intellectuals have sprung
from the unintellectual class. It does not
in the least, however, destroy the impor-
tance of the fact that ability and capacity
breed their like. The time ability takes to
fight its way into notice renders " sports "
of little service for most national purposes ;
the great majority of our legislators and of
our leaders in art, literature, commerce, and

72 Appendix I

science are drawn from the intellectual classes.
Ability, not entirely, but largely, runs in
stocks ; and these stocks by a long process
of social evolution form in the bulk the
upper social classes. Let us use every net
to catch and train ability for national pur-
poses, wherever it may be found ; yet in the
main able and capable men are largely the
product of capable and able parents, as tall
men are the product of taller stocks. If we
accept the fact that mental characters are
inherited, we are at once forced to ask
whether the intellectual classes are maintain-
ing their birth-rate. This is the third stage
in my argument.

'III. The birth-rate of the abler and more
intellectual classes in this country is falling,
relatively to that of the poorer stocks. Does
anyone really venture to deny this proposi-
tion ? Statistics are forthcoming, and will be
shortly published, to show that the families of
the intellectual classes are smaller now, very
sensibly smaller, than they were in the same
classes fifty years ago ; that the same state-
ment is true of the abler and more capable
working and artisan classes ; but that as you
go down in the social grade the reduction
in size of families is less marked. This is
true not only of Great Britain, but of the
United States and of some of our colonies.
That the reduction is not in the main due to
the later marriage of the intellectual classes,
as Sir J. Crich ton- Browne suggests, would,

National Deterioration 73

I think, be manifested at once if our leading
gynaecologists would give frank evidence on
the point.

'A diminution of national fertility may
not be an unmixed evil, if it begins with the
less able, or better, with the mentally and
physically defective stocks in the community.
But if we once realize that ability, that mental
and moral characters are inherited, and that
the fertility of the better and abler, the
more intellectual and more socially valuable
stocks in the nation, is certainly diminishing
relatively to the feebler and poorer stocks,
then I think we must see approaching a
crisis which it will need a wide change in
present social views, possibly even legislative
action, to counteract. Is the dearth of ability
real ? Ask the men who have to appoint
headmasters to schools, engineers to India,
judges to dependencies, colonial governors,
or civil servants at home ! Nay, go further,
and, putting party aside, note how few are
the younger men who to-day have the power
to touch the nation as a whole and lead it
politically. The dearth of ability to-day must
indeed depress each thoughtful Englishman ;
but if its sources are to be found in the
two facts, first, that mental characters are
inherited, and secondly, that the fertility of
our abler and more intellectual stocks has
been relatively diminishing during the last
half of the nineteenth century, is not a
remedy still possible ?'

74 Appendix I

Sir J. Crichton- Browne's reply will be
found in the Times of August 29, and led
to the second letter, which follows here
(Times, September 5) :

' As Sir J. Crichton- Browne appeals from
the report of his address to the full text,
which I have not yet seen, it becomes im-
possible to base any argument on the sum-
mary provided in the Times of August 18.
But there are several points in his reply to
my letter which I think illustrate the differ-
ence between his and my attitude to problems
of this kind, and which I should like to
comment upon.

* All these sociological problems are really
problems of mass statistics, and no appeal to
mere opinion can be of any value. We can
only appeal to statistical data reduced by
adequate modern statistical methods. We
have before us a definite problem : Is or is
there not a dearth of ability at the present
time in this country? If there be, what are
the causes which account for it, and how can
the evil be remedied ? It will be noticed
that I prefer to use the term ability, because
all ability cannot be fairly described as
" intellectual," and the term " intellectuals"
is to my mind as objectionable as ''genius."
" Intelligence," " energy," " ability," I think
I grasp; " intellectuality " and "genius" I
am doubtful about ; and as for the " infec-
tivity of genius," it appears to me in the

National Deterioration 75

cases cited by Sir James Crich ton- Browne to
amount largely to the creation of a fashion,
and not to the calling into play of ability
which would otherwise have remained poten-
tial. Healthy rivalry among equals is a
great thing, perhaps the best thing for a
leader in literature or science. But few such
leaders can probably look with equanimity
upon their own " intellectual infectivity " ;
they see their methods abused and carica-
tured by men of minor ability, who have
drifted into wrong channels owing to the
fashion of the moment. Let us use, then,
the broader words, ability and capacity.

' I take it that, judged by investigation of
special phases of these, we can now say that
capacity and ability are inherited. Further,
that Sir James Crichton- Browne agrees
with me not only in this point, but also in
the equality of degree between the inheri-
tance of mental and physical characteristics
in man. Now my point is this : that since
the spread of modern civilization — railways
schools, manufactures — say, since 1840, it
has become much easier than previously for
ability and capacity — I do not wish to con-
fine our attention to intellectuality — to rise
from the ranks. The upper middle-classes
have been enormously increased and re-
cruited in this way. Taking even monetary
success as a crude measure of ability an^
capacity, we find there has been a selection
repeated for several generations, of able in\

j6 Appendix I

dividuals from the lower ranks. The upper
middle classes are the result of a severe
selection of capacity, and, later, of inter-
marrying, under conditions which seem no
longer possible. Think of the number of
men who rose through sheer ability in the
early days of railway engineering, of modern
manufacture, and even of modern science,
and compare their number with the output
now ! The Whitworth scholarships have
done excellent work, the County Council
scholarships fair work, in drawing out ability
from the masses. But I believe each time
the net is cast the harvest is less profitable.
There are marked exceptions, but my own
experience as a teacher is that the average
County Council scholar is now intellectually,
and very often physically, not up to the level
of the average middle-class student ; so it
comes about that a good draughtsman has
been turned into a poor engineer, a fair com-
positor into a very minor man of letters, an
excellent clerk into a second-rate schoolmaster.
' I repeat again what I have said previously :
throw the net as widely as you can — if its
meshes are not too small — drain all the
capacity and ability you can from the ranks
into commission. But the middle classes
form a caste into which the bulk of the abler
stocks in the community have already drifted.
By downward selection and by emigration of
their ne'er-do-well members, by intermarriage
and by recruiting from below, the charac-

National Deterioration 77

teristics of this caste have been strengthened
and rendered more permanent. Sir James
Crich ton- Browne has misunderstood my
point when he talks of the potentially intel-
lectual class outside the upper social classes
being possibly i per cent, of the population.
No breeder who was seeking to strengthen
certain characters would start from indivi-
duals in the population at large ; he would
start from the stocks already exhibiting
traces of the characters he needed. That
an exceptional individual is often born of
commonplace parents does not prove the
existence of potentially intellectual stocks ;
it merely shows the range of variation in a
large population, and is no test — in defect
of ancestry — that the variation will be the
origin of a new stock. It is the realization
of these points, that not all, but the bulk, of
the abler and more capable stocks have
drifted into the upper middle classes, and
that ability is inherited, which makes, in my
opinion, the decreasing relative fertility of
these classes a matter of the most serious
national importance.

* Sir James Crichton- Browne admits the
dearth of ability, but he nevertheless asserts
that we have "in the humbler or uneducated
class, as it is called, a reserve of intellectuals
of undiminished fertility, capable of supply-
ing recruits to the intellectual class of the
next generation." The only answer I can
make to this is, u Statistics upon the table,

78 Appendix I

please." Otherwise this is mere opinion. It
is the ladder, or what I term the net, which,
according to Sir James, is defective. As
far as I can see, the County Councils at
present are almost carrying individuals up
the ladder.

4 In my letter to you, sir, I did not not say
that the dearth of ability was solely due to
the decreased relative fertility of the abler
classes. I said that statistically this could
be demonstrated as a vera causa, but it may
not be the only one. If we know it to be
at least one source — I hold a principal source
— of the evil, we have recognised, at any
rate, in what direction to strive for a partial
remedy. Sir James Crichton- Browne in the
last paragraph of his letter seems to admit
my contention, although he speaks of "the
ominous significance of the fall in the birth-
rate," a term which from my standpoint can
have no significance whatever in this matter.
The problem is one of relative net fertility,
and the fall or rise in the birth-rate, as cal-
culated in the usual manner by the Registrar-
General, seems to have no bearing on the
subject. If Sir James admits my vera causa,
it may be asked why am I not content to
recognise his also ? Or ought I to say his
two causes ? These appear to be :

'i. " The artificial production of stupidity
in various ways."

1 These ways are not closely defined, and
I do not clearly know to what Sir James

National Deterioration 79

Crichton- Browne is referring. I am almost
inclined to think that, if we could give a
measure to stupidity, we should find less of
it now than a hundred years ago. Certainly,
if stupidity is cured by education, there is
less of it. If, on the other hand, Sir James
refers to inherited stupidity, I think there
may be danger of more of it, because the
stupid and foolish are now very carefully
looked after, have a high relative fertility,
and their offspring are allowed to survive
and marry in the modern struggle for exist-
ence. This point has been recently em-
phasized by those who have had to deal with
the problem of mentally defective children.

4 2. " To the incessant draining from the
country, which is the fit and proper breeding-
place and rearing-ground of intellect, into
our big towns of the best elements of our
people, to be swallowed up and exterminated
or deteriorated there."

* Now it is quite possible that every word
of this statement is truth ; the fact that I
personally can "live" in the country, only
" survive " in the Metropolis, draws me sym-
pathetically towards this view. But as a
statistician I must say sorrowfully that I
think every sentence in it is mere opinion.
The investigations that would be needed to
establish the statement are very complex
and extended, and it certainly cannot be
established by a simple quotation from Dr.
Ogle. It is usually said that no family can

80 Appendix I

exist for three generations in London.1* Has
anyone made an investigation of this ques-
tion, or determined in any rural district how
many families have existed for three genera-
tions on one spot ? This part of the pro-
blem in itself is full of pitfalls ; in districts
of Berkshire, say, you may find a most
migratory farming class ; in the Yorkshire
dales the farmers have been sedentary in
some cases for centuries. Is it impossible
for the farming class to survive three genera-
tions in Berkshire ? Nothing but a most
careful statistico-genealogical inquiry would
determine whether in London there was true
extermination, or whether we have merely a
phase of the mysterious migration problem.
It is idle to show that many persons' ances-
tors are immigrants into London ; it must be
actually demonstrated that the sedentary
population has a lower net fertility than in
a corresponding rural district, and that this
net fertility is not artificial. Then, again,
" the fit and proper breeding-place and rear-
ing-ground of intellect " is the country. How
and when was this demonstrated ? Having
due regard to population, to the relative
ability of the several components of our
English nation, have more able men been
(a) born, (6) reared, in country or in town ?
Who is in a position to answer this question ?

* Communications which have reached me since this
letter was published show that the statement is at least
not universally true.

National Deterioration 81

* It has not yet, as far as I know, been
dealt with from the standpoint of science.
I have already asked for proof that the town
population is " exterminated." Death-rates
give little information ; many rural denizens
retire to towns to pass their old age, or, when
ill, to be treated in town hospitals. Accidents
are naturally more frequent in towns. And
until these factors have been discriminated by
modern statistical methods, and the migration
problem thoroughly discussed, no answer is
possible. And, lastly, as to the vexed question
of deterioration, who can safely say anything
on this point ? The deterioration must be
in the sedentary population of the towns,
and the problem must not be obscured by
the emigration into the towns of the wastrel
population of country districts. Admit a
larger proportion of degenerates in certain
towns than in certain rural districts, has any-
one investigated whether their stock is urban
or rural ? In almost every rural village in
England mentally defective children will be
found, not, of course, segregated as they are
in the special schools of big towns. But can
anyone yet tell us the proportions of rural
mentally defective children, of urban mentally
defective children born to sedentary parents,
and of the same class born to rural immi-
grants largely of the wastrel type ? Sir
James Crichton- Browne may be correct in
his second source of national deterioration,
but his presentment of it bristles with

6

82 Appendix I

statements of which, so far, no statistical
demonstration has been given. On the
other hand, I think there is statistical proof
of my factor that the abler stocks are now
relatively less fertile, and that this, associated
with the inheritance of ability, must lead to a
dearth of the capable men required to officer
all branches of our national activity.

' I should above all things like to see a
full and careful inquiry into the action of
town life on racial characters. But I do not
believe that this can be done by commissions.
It must be done by a statistical bureau with
ample staff and equipment. The problem is
a delicate, intricate, and extensive one, which
may take years to solve, but its solution
would be of the greatest national importance.
Above all, no hasty step should be taken in
asserting that our present dearth of ability
is due in the main to the predominance of
urban life. In nearly all medico-sociological
problems at the present day we need a pre-
liminary statistical inquiry, and this must be
made on modern statistical lines. If Sir
James Crichton- Browne's insistence on the
evils of urban life leads to such an inquiry,
it will have done great good. It may be
noted that probably the first stage in such an
inquiry would be the much-needed anthro-
pometric survey of our whole school popula-
tion. But I do not think the need for such
an inquiry should postpone our pressing
home on the English middle classes the

National Deterioration 83

real seriousness from the national standpoint
of their reduced relative fertility. Town
life may lead to desire of ease and other
pleasures than those of the family, but no
nation can in the long-run survive if the
abler stocks do not provide their full share
of the population. In our case, probably
more than in that of any other nation, is
the productivity of these stocks of immense
importance. There is a great wastage, and
must be, of capable young men in India
and elsewhere, and this wastage has to be
supplied in addition to the ordinary drafts
needed for home service.

' My difference with Sir James Crichton-
Browne is therefore this : I do not wish to
see what I hold and he admits to be a
vera causa of our present dearth of ability
placed on one side while time is spent in
investigating what is possibly a contributory
cause, but which at present is far from having
been established as a definite factor by any
adequate statistical evidence.'

These letters are not republished here
because they endeavour to controvert the
views of Sir J. Crichton- Browne. He and
I may after all not be very far apart in our
aims or opinions. But they are reprinted
because they reiterate from a slightly different
aspect the lesson of my Newcastle lecture —
namely, that from the standpoint of science
the nation has yet to learn that its relative

6—2

84 Appendix I

output of ability is quite 'as important as its
educational facilities. When this lesson has
been learnt there will be a demand for a new
anthropology, and its functions will be ancil-
lary to the higher statecraft. And if we are
asked what are the first stages to be taken in
dealing with these problems of national fitness,
we may answer : First, the actual awakening
of the nation to the consciousness that these
problems of its ability, strength, and fitness
are the great national problems ; and secondly,
in order that they may be answered wisely,
we need to take anthropometric stock of
where we stand and whither we are moving.
The first need in this direction is the institu-
tion of a national bureau to issue decennial
reports on the physical and mental condition
of the population, beginning with what is at
once feasible, the school, pauper, criminal,
and lunatic populations of the country.^

In the following two appendices abstracts
are given of recent lectures touching on
special points referred to in the more general
lecture reprinted in this volume. It is hoped
that these abstracts may indicate to the
reader the type of statistical work which has

* Cf. the author's Prefatory Essay of 1902, 'The
Function of Science in the Modern State,' ' Encyclopaedia
Britannica,' Supplement, vol. xxxii.

Recent Work in Heredity 85

been for some time in progress. Should
he desire further information, he will find
material in the chapter on evolution in the
author's ' Grammar of Science ' (second edi-
tion, A. and C Black, 1900), in some of the
essays in the author's ' Chances of Death '
(E. Arnold, 1897), but more especially in
the numerous statistical memoirs which have
appeared in the four published volumes of the
journal Biometrika (Cambridge University
Press, 1901-1905).

APPENDIX II

RECENT WORK IN HEREDITY

An Abstract of a Lecture delivered in
November, 1 904

THE lecturer regretted that the title of his
discourse was somewhat deceptive, but ex-
plained that it was framed while matters
were comparatively peaceful, before the con-
troversy now raging about the subject of
inheritance had begun. He stated that
throughout the lecture he should avoid con-
troversial points as far as possible, simply
giving his audience an account of the work
which had recently been done in his labora-

86 Appendix II

tory by his friends and himself, and of some
of the conclusions to which they had been
led. Nevertheless, it was only fair to remind
his hearers that there was another way of
looking at these matters, but that, of course,
they must read or hear about for themselves.
The lecturer pointed out incidentally that he
and his collaborators do not depend on any
biological theory such as pangenesis, but
simply describe statistically the observed facts.

His remarks this evening would be based
almost entirely upon measurements made
upon some 1,100 families, and upon observa-
tions of some 6,000 school boys and girls.

Although his subject was rather off the
beaten track of academic studies, he hoped
that in time it would become part of a
university course. The peculiar merit of
such research is that everybody can help.
There is an idea that research work in
science is only possible to people who have
taken a good degree. He remembered
a story of a Newnham student who had
not taken a brilliant degree, and was there-
fore told that she had better not go in
for any more science, but should apply
herself to * greasing the social wheels.' Even
this desirable work, however, is very difficult
without the aid of science ; charitable relief,
medical work, and even domestic problems
require a knowlede of heredity, and the best
way to get this knowledge is for each person

Recent Work in Heredity 87

to do some work for himself on the subject.
It might sound a rather heretical remark to
make within academic walls, but, as a matter
of fact, a period of life comes to nearly every
student when he burns his text-books and
begins to think for himself, and realizes that
the diagrammatic life of the lecture-room is
not the real world of nature. With a scien-
tific conscience — in other words, a great
capacity for taking pains and a determination
to be absolutely truthful — sociological re-
search is one in which everyone can take part.

The great general problem of heredity is
this : Given the ancestry, what are the
offspring likely to be ?

Now, the characters of the offspring de-
pend on those of the parents ; and if we
knew the parents completely, we should know
the offspring, but in reality only a few factors
are knowable in the parent, and it is to the
remoter ancestors that we must go in search
of conditions which will explain the germinal
characters of the parents. The lecturer re-
minded his audience that he and his col-
laborators had been contemptuously called
' ancestrians/ They welcomed the name
with pride, further asserting that they are
not only ancestrians, but collateralists as well,
for if one wants to study one's own germinal
capacity one must examine not only one's
ancestors, but one's aunts, uncles, and
cousins.

88 Appendix II

Now, the first thing to do in comparing
one individual with another is to find a way
of measuring their resemblance. At present
it is not possible to measure general resem-
blance ; Mr. Francis Galton thinks such a
method may be possible in the future, and it
is to be hoped that he will succeed in time
in elaborating one ; meanwhile we must be
content to compare single characteristics, such
as pigmentation, size and shape of individual
organs, or even intellectual characters.

He would first call the attention of his
audience to a table drawn up from imagina-
tion, to show what would happen if there
were no such thing as inheritance. It is
found, say, that among cattle, in every ten
about two are parti-coloured, three red, four
roan, and one white. Now, if there were no
such thing as inheritance each sire would
produce offspring of which two in every ten
would be parti-coloured, three red, four roan,
and one white — that is, his offspring would
resemble not himself, but the general popu-
lation, in pigmentation. Now, it is found
actually that no such thing occurs ; parti-
coloured sires mated in the actual proportions
with the females of the community will pro-
duce offspring of whom the majority will be
parti-coloured, and so on, and, if it be put
in the form of a table in which the offspring
of each kind of sire are in a vertical line, we
may have results like this :

Recent Work in Heredity 89

SIRES.

(Parti-coloured - 48 12 16 4

Red .... 12 78 24 6

Roan - - - 16 24 112 8

White ... 4 6 8 22

It will be observed that the greatest numbers
come diagonally across the table ; hence this
diagonal arrangement must be in some man-
ner a measure of the degree of resemblance
between sire and offspring.

The lecturer further showed by means of
a model that in comparing stature of fathers
and sons, the same weighting of the diagonal
is obtained. Thus, where the stature of the
father is above the average, so is that of the
son, though not by as much.

That this inheritance of the father's charac-
teristics is a general rule may further be seen
by comparing the cubits of father and son —
i.e., the measurement from tip of finger to
elbow. Here it is found that fathers with
long cubits pull their sons cubits up above
the average length by about half of the
difference in cubit between the father and
the average ; while short fathers pull their
sons below the average by the same amount.

In this way '5 may be taken as a measure
of the degree of resemblance between a child
and one parent. Since exceptional mothers
are found to exert the same influence of about

90 Appendix II

half upon their offspring, it is to be expected
that the sum of the father's and mother's
influence would equal unity. If exceptional
parents married at random this would be the
case, but in practice it is not so, for since
there is a tendency for like to mate with like,
some of the characters undergo reduction.
A convenient formula for expressing the
actual extent of inheritance is the following :

Length of son's stature
= *4" + TTHF of father's stature -f TW of mother's stature.

Length of daughter's stature
= n"-f fV<r of father's stature -fy4^ of mother's stature.

(This is, of course, not absolute for indi-
viduals, but holds only for averages.) Thus,
two parents who have an exceptional stature
give their offspring 80 to 83 per cent, of their
stature.

Exceptional grand-parents bring this up to 95%.

„ great-grand-parents bring this up to 97%.

The offspring of the individual who has
thus been pulled up, provided his mate is up
to the like standard, do not regress. In
other words, a stock may be formed in two
generations, and, once formed, the respon-
sibility of maintaining the stock afterwards
lies with the individual. Here, then, begins
legitimate pride in ancestry. Similar rela-
tions were shown to hold between mother

Recent Work in Heredity 91

and daughter, and between father and daugh-
ter, and the same principle is found true for
many other characters.

If other pairs of .relatives be considered, a
similar ' correlation ' is observed. Thus, from
knowing the length of the forearm of the
brother the probable forearm of the sister
can be predicted, while, on comparing the
cephalic indices of a large number of pairs
of brothers and plotting them against each
other, the means of the fraternities of brothers
with given head-shape were shown to lie
almost upon a straight line. It is found,
moreover, that brothers and sisters are rather
more like each other than like their parents.

Similar principles may be applied to the
classification of individuals according to
mental qualities. Teachers were found to
agree to within 85 per cent, in their classific-
ation of children according to intelligence.
If their classification of a large number of
children into ' very dull,' * slow dull,' 'slow,'
4 intelligent,' and 'quick intelligent1 be
adopted, it is found that the average child is
on the border-line between 'slow' and 'intelli-
gent.' If, now, pairs of sisters be classified, it
is generally found that the ' slow dull's ' sister
will fall somewhere between ' slow dull ' and
'slow intelligent,' while the sister of the
' quick intelligent ' will probably be merely
' intelligent.' Thus, again, the exceptional
individual indicates an average relative above

92 Appendix II

the average of the general population, but
does not connote a relative as far away from
the average as himself. A like relationship
is seen in comparing sisters with brothers.

If these principles be further extended to
intellectual and moral qualities, such as
vivacity, assertiveness, introspection, popu-
larity, probity, temper, intelligence, and even
handwriting, a quality which has probably
much to do with temper and conscientious-
ness, similar laws are found to hold good.

Now, if we further compare the figures
obtained for degrees of physical resemblance
with those for degrees of psychical resem-
blance, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion
that they are inherited at about the same
rate. This was illustrated by plotted curves,
which were shown practically to coincide.

The question now arises : Do the same
laws hold among animals ? There is no
doubt that they do, as the following example,
one of many, will show :

Resemblance between Sire and Male Offspring.
•49 = eye-colour in man.
•52 = coat „ „ horse.
'53 = » » j? basset-hound.
•53= :, » » greyhound.
•52 = mean.

It will be observed that the figures approxi-
mate closely.

When it becomes a question of the lower

Recent Work in Heredity 93

organisms, such as snails, moths, water-fleas,
etc., we are met by the difficulty that few
figures on the subject are at present avail-
able. This is, indeed, a field in which far
more research is required. But as far as we
may venture an opinion at present, it seems
likely that the same law of inheritance holds
for mass-communities in all forms of life.

It is found that the degree of resemblances
of grand-parents is about two-thirds that of
parents.

Hence the inheritance from a grand-parent

= ixf = '33-
While the inheritance from a great-grand-parent ;

=*'33xf = '22.

Thus the intensity of inheritance appears
to decrease in geometrical progression as we
go backward.

Now, to summarize, though no physio-
logical theory has been formulated, it is
possible to arrive by pure statistics at the
degree of inheritance, and hence to predict
fairly accurately what the average offspring
of any pair will be like ; and this is what the
social reformer, the medical man, and even
the politician, really want to know when
dealing with the people in large masses.

The newer biological theories appear in
their latest form to invert our process ; they
require a knowledge of the offspring and

94 Appendix II

often of the offspring's offspring before they
can predict the characters of the parents.

From our standpoint we are forced to
realize that in judging of social conduct —
e.g. — of the suitability of persons for charity,
etc., we should be particular in inquiring
concerning ancestry. Pity and help the
weak, but remember that it is a national evil
when any charitable or social institution
allows the indefinite multiplication of the
unfit in mind or body.

In all social work and in all legislative
action true progress is impossible if the
reformer and the legislator do not know and
pay attention to the principles of heredity.

Major L. Darwin moved a vote of thanks
to Professor Pearson, and said his own
interest in the subject was inherited ; and
he gave an emphatic warning against the
evils which may, without care, result from
the present movement for educating defective
children. The danger was lest their educa-
tion, by making their departure from the
ordinary standard less obvious, should make
it possible for them to marry and hand on
their defects of mind and body to their
descendants.

Heredity and Conduct 95

APPENDIX III

THE BEARING OF OUR PRESENT KNOWLEDGE
OF HEREDITY UPON CONDUCT

An Abstract of a Lecture delivered in
May, 1 904

IN any general discussion on matters of con-
duct our first questions must be, What do we
understand by ' morality ' ? and Why do we
act * morally ' ?

At the basis of our nature there are two
general principles :

1. The instinct of self.

2. The instinct of the ' herd/

In certain types of life the gregarious ten-
dency is small ; in man it is, perhaps, more
dominant than any other instinct. The
individual struggle is subordinated to the
struggle between group and group, and the
whole progress of mankind is largely due to
the survival of those groups which are the
most completely 'socialized.'

Now while nobody denies the instinct of
self-preservation, some may deny the instinct
of the Jierd, yet as a slight proof of its
innate existence we admit that the bulk of
us feel shame at national disaster and a thrill

96 Appendix III

at the heroism of men of our own race ; that
we have a pride in the success and a firm
belief in the future of our nation. We have,
in short, an instinct which impels us to work
for the preservation and the development of
the society of which we are members. This
instinct is precisely like that which, in other
types of life, guides the conduct of the herd in
uniting for common defence. The tendency
to social conduct is a product of evolution
resulting from the survival of the group in
which this instinct was most strongly de-
veloped and most rationally guided. All of
us probably pass through a period of meta-
physical measles, but having done so, we
drop the categorical imperative and face the
historical evolution of morality. If we trace
that evolution from the folk-lore and custom
of the most barbarous groups up to the
highest stages of civilization, we recognise
no permanent code of moral action apart from
our social relations. Moral conduct is social
conduct, and immoral conduct anti-social con-
duct. And what is social and what is anti-
social depends upon the condition of the
society with which we are dealing. From this
aspect legal institutions, industrial systems,
and religious customs, which are moral to
one state of society, may be immoral to
another state of society, or, indeed, to the
same society at a different period.

By moral conduct, then, we mean that

Heredity and Conduct 97

which tends to the welfare and progress of
the group of which we are members, and by
immoral conduct the reverse. The gratifi-
cation of instinct, in this case the instinct to
' social ' conduct, is the * reason ' for social
conduct. There is a correlation between
happiness and the fulfilment of instinct, and
the source of the instinct is the continual
selection for survival of those groups with
more social instinct in the struggle of group
against group.

Now if we admit this view, two divisions
of our topic for to-day at once confront us :

1. What is our present knowledge with
regard to heredity in man ?

2. How does this bear upon conduct — on
the action of individuals in relation to the
welfare of society as a whole ?

With regard to the first division, we find
from observation a perfectly definite inheri-
tance of physical characters.

[The lecturer here illustrated by tables and diagrams
the inheritance of characters from father to son ; the
average son inherits '4 to '5 of the deviation from
mediocrity of the father.]

The same inheritance can be traced in all
human characters upon which investigations
have hitherto been made. So universal,
indeed, is this principle of inheritance, that
if the main characteristics of a number of
parents are given we can safely predict the

7

9^ Appendix III

constitution of their average offspring, Nor
is this inheritance confined to man alone, for
we find almost the same hereditary intensity
in other forms of life, from dog to water-flea.
Fraternal relationships are equally strong!
Thus, if we consider the cephalic index, the
ratio of breadth to length of skull, we find
the slope of the ' regression line ' in the case
of parental relationships to be -4 to -5, while
in the case of fraternal it is -5 to '6.

Now progress does not depend solely on
physique, but also on ' psychique.' But if we
turn to the consideration of the inheritance of
psychical characters, we see the same results.

The line which represents the resemblance
of brothers in ability has a slope which again
approximates to the mean -5, and a like
result is also shown in plotting the inheri-
tance of shyness or temper.

Fraternal resemblances have the same in-
tensity for physical and psychical characters.
From wide observations, then, we are led to
this general statement : Inheritance in masses
of men is the same as in other forms of life,
and this inheritance covers both physical and
psychical characters. We do not know what
is the best type of man for the society of the
future, but we do know that no society can ,
exist in which health, sanity, and intellectual
ability are not fully represented. We know J
also that health, sanity, conscientiousness and '
ability are inherited characters. If you breed

Heredity and Conduct 99

largely from the unhealthy, the mentally
defective, the stupid and unconscientious
members of a society, your society will de-
generate, and that more rapidly than is
generally recognised. Thus 25 per cent, of
married couples produce 50 per cent, of the
next generation. In other words, owing to
difference in the size of families, probably
about one-sixth of the adult men and women
in the community produce more than half the
next generation. If that one-sixth chances
to be the less thrifty, less conscientious, less
sane and less able portion of the community,
a very few generations will suffice to totally
change the character of a nation. The inex-
plicable decline and fall of nations following
from no apparent external cause receives
instant light from the relative fertility of the
fitter and unfitter elements combined with
what we now know of the laws of inheritance.
The one safeguard against this multipli-
cation of the unfit lies in a selective death-
rate. And man as much as any other form
of life is subject to natural selection.

[This was illustrated by diagrams of the < Inheritance
of Duration of Life,' and of the relation between
' Number of Offspring and Length of Life '; also by
tables giving determinations of the selective death-rate
in man.]

The effects of natural selection are in man,
however, interfered with by other causes, the
chief of which is the relative fertility of class.

7—2

ioo Appendix III

We have, then, two opposing factors —
natural selection and selection of the most
fertile, who may be the most unfit. Both
these processes can be largely controlled by
human institutions, and it is one of the
gravest problems of both individual and
communal conduct to realize to what extent
our actions will tend to check or foster these
two tendencies.

Next let us turn to the second division of
the subject : how do these laws of inheritance
of fertility and of selection apply to the present
state of affairs ?

If we consider the general birth-rate of this
country, we find that since 1877 it has been
steadily declining. Some of this decline is
due to lessened infant mortality and increas-
ing longevity, but a part of it to actually
decreased fertility.

We might hope, however, that if fewer
beings come into the world, they are, at
least, born of the healthier, saner, and thriftier
classes. The very reverse is the case. The
birth-rate of the better type of working man
has been falling off more rapidly than the
birth-rate of the nation as a whole. [Illus-
trated by diagrams.]

Let us compare this state of things with
the increase of lunacy in the population at
large. Lunacy is one of the things which we
may quite definitely accept as an inherited
character. The stock in the community in

Heredity and Conduct 101

which it is prevalent has been freely repro-
ducing itself. If we try to attribute the
increase to the ' thranged ' state of modern
life, we have only to consider the rapid in-
crease of imbecile children. [Diagram.]

The percentage of the mentally defective
among the pauper population is also in-
creasing rapidly. This spread of the degene-
rate is not due to harder modern conditions
of life, for these conditions are substantially
better than they were 50 or 100 years ago.
It is due to two facts :

1. That the action of natural selection has
been largely suspended ; the physically and
mentally unfit are now tended and provided
for in a manner quite unknown 100 years ago.

2. The relative fertility of the fit and unfit
in the community has changed widely since
1877. A hundred years ago you hung a
rogue if you caught him. Nowadays you
provide him with soup-kitchens and night-
shelters up and down the country, and leave
him to propagate his kind at will.

To cite an often-quoted German case :
One woman, a thief, a drunkard, and a
tramp, had 709 traceable descendants ; of
these 1 06 were illegitimate, 142 tramps and
beggars, and 64 lived on charity ; 181 of her
female descendants were women of ill-fame.
Of the total tribe 7 were murderers and 76
convicts ; and altogether, in 75 years in trials,
almshouses, and prisons, the tribe cost a

IO2 Appendix III

quarter of a million" in money to the State.
It would have been better for society if this
woman had been at once removed from it.
Criminality is as much inherited as any other
psychical character, and to allow it scope to
reproduce itself is more anti-social than the
old custom of giving it short shrift.

I do not think that there can be the least
doubt that with the great extension of chari-
ties— whether for food or for medical assist-
ance— we have tended more and more to
check the action of natural selection within
the community.

But the lessened restraint on the fertility
of the unfit would be of small effect if it had
not been accompanied by the relatively more
restrained fertility of the fit.

The unthrifty increase and multiply, and
make the struggle harder for the thrifty, the
conscientious, and the able, who have to pro-
vide not only for their own offspring, but
for the offspring of the unfit in the next
generation.

I would therefore emphasize the view that
much of the current feeling with regard to
early marriage and good -sized families is
demonstrably immoral, and is opposed to
social welfare in that it must lead to the degene-
ration of the society in which it is current.

Our present knowledge of heredity shows
us that the average man is a product of his
ancestors in health, in intellect, and in honesty.

Heredity and Conduct 103

Hence all social conduct should be directed,
on this point to insuring that the minority,
who in any case provide the next generation,
.is formed from the best stock in the com-
munity. The fertility of the unhealthy, of
the mentally defective, of the dishonest,
should be checked by custom and legislation
in every way ; while that of the healthy, sane,
and conscientious should, on the other hand,
be in every way encouraged.

If we consider first individual conduct, we
see need for a revision of current social feel-
ing with regard to ancestral history. Both
man and woman ought to know the tale of
their past ; the faults, physical and mental, of
ancestors and other relations ought not to be
hidden away ; and the need of a new and
rational pride in ancestry should be inculcated.

The celibacy of the individual who comes
of faulty stock should be recognised in social
conduct, and social condemnation should
follow marriage into a tainted stock or the
marriage of any members of such stock.
But such restraint of bad stock must also
be accompanied among the educated by a
change of feeling as to the conduct of the
healthy, able, and generally fit stock.

We require, indeed, what it may be diffi-
cult to create — a strong social feeling against
that celibacy which flows from the desire for
the increased powers of enjoyment resulting
when no hostages have been given to fortune.

104 Appendix III

A reconsideration of current feeling in the
educated classes may achieve something ; it
might even modify the disastrous drop in
fertility to which I have just referred. But
it cannot achieve everything. Even if we
succeeded in convincing the better type of
artisan of the anti-social character of his
present conduct, we have also to meet the
fact that the fertility of the unthrifty, of the
mentally defective, and of the criminal classes,
cannot be influenced in this way, and it is
relatively larger than that of the better stock.

Now, I do not advocate any return to the
hanging of rogues, nor would I propose to
cease medically assisting the physically and
mentally unfit ; but I would, both by social
opinion and by legislative action, limit in
every way their multiplication. Society is
bound to provide for the criminal, the tramp,
the congenital pauper, and the imbecile born
in its midst, yet, while undertaking this duty,
it should insure that, so far from increasing in
numbers, their stock should diminish. It is
easy to see a variety of ways in which some
effect could be given to this idea.

I do not believe that the closing of all the
casual wards in the country would be unjust
to a single human being who is of any value
to the nation at large. Again, we have the
undesirable alien admitted because he keeps
wages down. He comes with a poor physique
and a low standard of life, and is often merely

Heredity and Conduct 105

a German or a Russian rogue. Should he
not, on his introduction, be asked to show
some credentials of his usefulness to our body
social ? Should he not be repatriated when-
ever he has been convicted of crime in this
country and has served his sentence ?

Next we have our own criminal classes-
Why should the habitual criminal be allowed
back into the community to propagate his
kind in the intervals between his prison
periods ? We ought to expatriate all con-
firmed criminals (our Empire is wide enough
to provide a corner for them) ; for the one
thing which does seem to upset the predic-
tions we can base on the laws of inheritance
is the influence of a complete change of
environment on the constitutional characters.
Let us send our criminals to a subtropical
climate.

Lastly, we come to the congenital pauper
and the insane. Here I think again society
would be justified in refusing to allow them
to pass in and out of workhouses and asylums.
The cure of the insane is idle in the sense
that their offspring will no longer be of
tainted stock.

All these points are only illustrations of
what a strong public opinion might achieve.
Once recognise that physical and psychical
characters are inherited, and current social
feeling on the subject of the unhealthy, the
mentally defective and criminal stocks must

io6 Appendix III

be immensely modified. The stability of
the nation depends essentially on the fitter
stock being given sensibly greater fertility
than the unfit stock.

As things stand at present, neglecting the
laws of inheritance, we are slipping down an
incline with increasing speed. A sense of
responsibility and of desire for comfort and
leisure is leading to an ever diminishing
birth-rate of the folk with mens sana in cor-
pore sano, and we have, on the other hand,
provided unlimited medical comforts and
housing for the physically unfit and for the
rogue. Whether knowledge of what is going
on can possibly bring about a change of
feeling I cannot say. If it does not, and
we leave the fertile, but unfit, one-sixth to
reproduce one-half the next generation, our
nation will soon cease to be a world power.

The problem is simple in the extreme.
We have two groups in the community — one
parasitic to the other. The latter thinks of
to-morrow and is childless, the former takes
no thought and multiplies. It can only
end as the case so often ends — the parasite
will kill its host, and so end the tale for both
alike.

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD

Demy Svo., Cloth. With 33 Illustrations. Price 7s. 6d. net.

THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE

Second Edition, thoroughly Revised and much Enlarged.
BY KARL PEARSON, M.A., F.R.S.,

PROFESSOR OF APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND MECHANICS IN UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE, LONDON.

Contains two entirely New Chapters on Natural Selection and
Heredity, embracing a popular account of Professor Pearson's
own more recent work in this direction.

SCOPE OF THE BOOK.

This work attempts to give a philosophical basis to the fundamental
principles of modern science. It assumes no special mathematical or
biological training on the part of the reader, but endeavours to lay before
the man with average education an intelligible account of what science
professes to achieve and of what it does not. The first four chapters define
the material and lay down the principles of all scientific reasoning ; they
explain the scope, methods, and hopes of science and its relation to our
theory of life. The following four chapters discuss the axioms and prin-
ciples of physical science, and endeavour to give a rational view of
mechanism which is not open to the criticisms raised against it by Balfour,
Ward, and other recent metaphysical writers. The next three chapters
deal with the science of organic forms, discussing the principal factors of
evolution and endeavouring to give them exact quantitative definition. The
two chapters on evolution place before the reader the present position of
the Darwinian theory, at the same time indicating the futility of recent
reactionary attacks. The final chapter deals with the classification of the
sciences, and gives a bird's-eye view of the fields wherein the specialist
alone can work.

PRESS NOTICES.

' Not the least interesting part of this powerful book is the discussion of
the effect on the mind of a true scientific education, which enables a man
or woman to form judgments freed from individual bias. . . . We recom-
mend all readers, and especially scientists, metaphysicians, theologians,
and last, but not least, the writers of scientific text-books, to read and
digest this well- written, clearly-reasoned description of what science and
scientific method is.'— Pall Mall Gazette.

^ . . . We have been again and again impressed in examining "The
Grammar" with the remarkable lucidity of Professor Pearson's explana-
tions. ' — Knowledge.

' It is still a grammar in that it deals with the foundations of science ;
but a far more ambitious title might have been given to so comprehensive a
work. ' — The Bookman .

ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON

Demy 8w, Cloth. Price 7s. 6d.

THE ETHIC OF FREETHOUGHT

AND

OTHER ADDRESSES AND ESSAYS

Second Edition, Revised.
BY KARL PEARSON, M.A., F R.S.,

PROFESSOR OF APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND MECHANICS IN UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE, LONDON.

PREFACE.

The first edition of this book appeared in 1888, and con-
tained Essays and Addresses which had been written in the
previous eight years. It has been out of print and in some
demand for a long time past. The present edition has been
carefully revised, but the author has refrained from modifying
the opinions expressed (except in bracketed footnotes) even
when they have ceased to represent his more fully developed
views. In its present form it won its old friends, and can thus
still serve best as a stimulus for thought.

The aim of the book is to contrast the emotional and
rationalistic treatments of philosophical and social problems ;
to show how the enthusiasm of the study is a real factor of
human development, and how the slow and gradual educational
work of the thinker is after all more permanent than the emo-
tional influence of the market-place. The author would allow
no social or religious problem to lie outside the legitimate field
of discussion, but he believes that any profitable answer can
only be found in a rational treatment of history— that all great
social changes can only be advantageous if based on a slow
educational reform of current ideas.

ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON

HOME USE

CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT

MAIN LIBRARY

OJ

s

LL

2 £

CO <

!il

O jQ-J

1=^
ill

o o-

^liJ
£or

P o^

DC con

:D <D -

i- -^ £

UJ C }

DC z> :

o
1

C/)

-n °0

-2 O)

CD CD

LL 03 t
? IS

gi 9

£ 03 05

o O <

if *s °

o ^"S

§ E g

. o E

O) > -C

P 'E 2

CD => DC

CO

ij

rr O3

DC o

£ >

59

Q 5

Uj |

< 2

/• > 0 ,

[d ---

tr 03^

LLJ E
CD CO— I

S

^

O

CD CM

2*

§-

_5J395_

jJ±CiBERKil=il-

fell
"Berkeley

YA 00842

3S17T2

HM

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY