Madison Isaac Bentley

“ We glance with admiration at his morning work in iron and bronze and brass, his noontime of Athenian culture, his late hours of reflection and invention, and we seek however feebly to illumine the night of his future; but we tend to overlook the antiquity of man, the record of other days and years, and to avoid the question whether civilization is not, after all, still in the experimental stage—whether we ourselves are not next-door neighbors to the barbarian. ”

“ But what, you may ask, has psychology to learn from the doctrine of physical inheritance, when bionomic orthodoxy is overgrown with speculation, when evolutionists themselves are asking, fifty years after Darwin, whether the time is yet ripe for a discussion of the origin of species, when they are raising the doubt whether there has yet fallen from the tree of knowledge the apple that shall suggest the discovery of the universal law of inheritance ”

“ We can not conceive a medieval musician—to go no further back—producing or comprehending our operas and symphonies; but who would say that native ability in music has grown in the meantime? Are we not then driven to the admission that no principle of selection has for a long time been sufficiently active to raise the level of mental endowment? We live on capital gathered and hoarded by the race. ”

“ But even when we know the general history of thought and the special histories of our own small divisions of human knowledge, we are apt to overlook the fact that, in a large sense, civilization itself is a matter of the moment, which may be viewed in the light of a broader perspective. Civilization we measure by hundreds and thousands of years. ”

“ Now that you have before you, in outline, the problem of mental inheritance, its debt to biology, and the present necessity—if the problem is to advance—for the analytical treatment of traits by a science of individual differences, let me in closing return to my earlier remarks touching the import of inheritance in human history. I urged that human knowledge and human obligation have grown out of proportion to human talent. ”

“ Does mental capacity keep pace with social accumulation? May we not suppose that the men and women of some distant glacial age, who dwelt upon the ice, wore the skin of the seal, and ate raw fish, had as much brain and as generous a measure of talent as have their remote descendents who wear sealskins, and eat ices and caviare? We can not say that they had not. On the contrary, our records, so far as they go, indicate that the social heritage has outstripped the hereditary growth of mind—that, as regards mental endowment, we begin very much as our distant forbears began ”

“ Notice, however, that man comes into his social heritage only by acquisition during his individual life, by his own individual efforts. Is he, now, as a conscious being, better and better endowed as time goes on for the process of absorption? Does talent grow as knowledge grows? ”

“ In our every-day thinking we take it for granted. The child, we maintain, inherits its father's bad temper just as it inherits its mother's good looks. We consider twice before we adopt the foundling, which may be of dull or vicious parentage. We shake our heads over the wayward son, remembering that his father "sowed his wild oats," and we observe "like father like son," or "blood will tell." We expect to find talent in the children of the gifted, thrift or dwarfed intellect or high purpose, according as these qualities are "bred in the bone." ”

“ At a period when the constitution of matter and its elementary forms have, by the discovery of new facts, been brought to the focus of attention; when the development of living forms through their various stages of growth is observed by methods undreamed of by the earlier historians of nature; when the study of evolution has advanced to the stage of analysis and experiment; when the earth is revealing significant traces of primitive man and his works; when psychology proposes new methods for the study of thought and action and for a comparison of the human with the animal mind ”

“ When we find that the part of our human stock which is best fitted to carry the cumulative load of civilization is weak, or degenerate, or inclined to sterility, why do we not look to the improvement of those strains that are mentally fittest and to the elimination of the bad? The argument, you observe, assumes that mental endowment and mental capacity are heritable possessions. Is the assumption warranted? We can not say until we have examined the present status of the problem of inheritance ”

“ Francis Galton reckons that England at its best falls two grades below the highest intellect of Athens; that England produces one man of supreme eminence where the older culture produced two hundred. Suppose that by improving the breed our mental endowment should recover those two grades. The effect, direct and indirect, upon the race is not easily estimated. It is conceivable that it should give to every generation a Homer or a Dante or a Shakespeare, and to each of the European states and America a dozen Newtons and Darwins. ”

“ Without inheritance the establishment of a stock would be impossible, and without a stock, variations and mutations would be chaotic and without significance. Thus, ever since Darwin's own attempt at a theory of heredity, we find the students of organic evolution and the breeders of plant and animal races alike devoting themselves to the problems of racial and individual inheritance. ”

“ When we regard the rapid accumulations of a few thousand years of culture, we realize that civilization lays upon the human mind a staggering load of traditional knowledge and traditional duty. In "Darwinism and Politics" the late Professor Ritchie has defined civilization as "the sum of human contrivances which enable human beings to advance independently of heredity." ”

“ The kindling enthusiasm of the man of science must not, however, be confused with the philistine's boast that history is a wreck from which only he and his time have been saved. Opportunity which inspires the scholar inflates the time-server and intoxicates the anarchist. ”

“ As you know, biometry's inspiration came from Francis Galton, traveler, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, student of evolution, psychology and sociology. The grandson of Erasmus Darwin, a representative therefore of one of the highly gifted strains of English blood, Galton has devoted himself to a quantitative study of the inheritance of talent and intellect, and to practical measures for purifying and improving the race. His interests revolve about the central theme of human ability and its dependence upon the stock. ”

“ Now it is plainly futile for the psychologist to pretend to firsthand knowledge in a field which is not his own; but, on the other hand, it is equally foolish for him to proceed to the question of mental inheritance without a conception of the methods used, and of the general progress made, by the biological sciences in like inquiries. ”

“ This kind of inquiry then—the kind that takes human beings in the mass and applies a rough unit of measurement—reveals in a striking way the importance of the hereditary factor in mental ability. However, the method does not constitute a science of heredity. No evolutionist would be satisfied to know that large horses beget large horses, and small horses small horses. It is the degree of likeness of some particular organ, or quality, or function, or peculiarity that the student of heredity now attempts to state, and to state often in numerical terms. ”

“ It is evident that the general psychology of the average normal mind will not suffice when the matter is one of defining differences among minds of the same class. Just as physical inheritance must take account of arrays and schemes of distribution, and not of averages, so must mental qualities and magnitudes be arranged with respect to definite individual variations within the class. ”

“ Scholarly work demands enthusiasm, and every epoch of science has, and, I suppose, will have, its sanctions and its rewards for enthusiastic endeavor. In this regard our own time certainly is not wanting. ”

“ The method of individual psychology, however, goes farther. After having reduced a conscious experience to simpler terms, the process of reconstruction begins. The functions and processes that have been reduced to numerical terms are recombined in their several amounts and the integration when complete represents an individual in so far as that individual is typical. With the absolute and exhaustive description of the individual as such, science is not concerned. Typical minds thus derived are, so to say, minds of different length and breadth and thickness. ”

“ If, so far as education went, the primitive boy was ready for man's estate at twelve or fifteen, can we wonder that at present the candidate for an advanced university degree has often passed his thirtieth birthday? We should rather marvel at the elasticity of the mind's response to new needs. ”

“ Shall we—that is to say—seek to describe the mechanism of inheritance, or to discover the like qualities that have actually appeared in successive generations of blood-relatives? It is quite impossible to state the alternatives without adverting to the fact that biology has, for a half-century, been absorbed in the parallel investigation of physical inheritance. ”

“ The difference between these persons rests at last upon temporal perspective, or the want of it; for it is the apprehension of new opportunities and new needs in the light of old accomplishments that leads to profitable reconstruction of human knowledge. ”

“ The present is so vivid, so impressive, so intimate, so important for action, as to compel attention; and current means of communication succeed so well in bringing distant lands and deeds within our field of vision that the whole world contributes to the fascination of the passing scene. ”

“ We all realize this fascination, however much we may set our faces against the vulgar homage paid to the latest mode, the most recent invention, or the last political experiment. We realize it, and, if we are wise, we perceive that the philistine passion for being "up-to-date" (as the street-phrase has it) contains an element of great value—the element of enthusiasm. ”

“ So far as we can tell, the child of to-day possesses the same nervous system, the same sense organs, evinces the same instinctive tendencies, in short, develops with the same physical and mental equipment as the child of unnumbered generations ago. ”

“ The folk-tale of paupered prince or stolen princess who never, though reared as swineherd or scullion, loses regal bearing and courtly demeanor, the wide respect for royal blood, and the easy belief in the "born criminal," alike testify to the common and venerable persuasion that minds, and even morals, are subject to hereditary transmission. ”

“ Contrast man and other animals. The animal carries over from his parents and from his racial stock the physical equipment and the functional tendencies which enable him to fight the battle of life precisely as his ancestors fought it. ”

“ You must, however, have been struck by the grossness of the method of collecting facts. What is the scientific value, you may have asked yourselves, of a teacher's or physician's opinion that A is more vivacious or less generous than B? ”

“ We have just seen that upon this question of analysis and measurement, quite apart from the problem of mechanism, the schools of evolution show wide differences of opinion, the biometrician basing his method upon the doctrine of probabilities and proceeding quantitatively, the Mendelian basing his method upon the doctrine of unit characters and segregation and proceeding analytically and by distinction of qualities.
Which of these methods, if either, is psychology to adopt? It happens that psychology has already made a provisional choice ”

“ Later studies, for example, Galton's own recent inquiry into the family history of Fellows of the Royal Society, have likewise shown that the person of superior mind is much more likely than the average to possess superior ancestors and descendants. These facts are justly interpreted as an indication that mental endowment depends in large measure upon direct inheritance. ”

“ The experimenter next proceeds to factor the performance into elementary processes and functions. By drawing his conditions closer and closer he discovers that the capacity for reading depends upon such simple factors as the range of consciousness, the degree of attention, and the temporal rate of visual processes, factors all capable of measurement and exact description. ”

“ Eugenics rests upon a scientific basis and it proposes a well-considered program for future activity. Whatever differences of opinion we may hold regarding the probable success of its methods, we must agree that civilized man may not indolently regard himself as "God's domestic animal" ”

“ It is, now, a matter of interest that these studies and others that might be brought under survey suggest that our mental traits and capabilities are derived, very much as are our bodily characteristics, from hereditary endowment. ”

“ With man all this is different. As I just now observed, nurture is cumulative. Each succeeding generation takes up its heritage, not where the preceding generation began, but where it left off. Each has to advance by first absorbing the new attainments of its immediate ancestors. In a real sense, therefore, because he has language and books and institutions and traditions, man is ”