Euthanasia : and other aspects of life and death / by Harry Roberts.

  • Harry Roberts
Date:
[1936]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Euthanasia : and other aspects of life and death / by Harry Roberts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    221/296 (page 209)
    sense of proud dignity, it is useless to look for the finer manifestations of human character. The doctrine of the clean slate at birth is, in the light of modern knowledge, an untenable one. Two children brought up by the same parents in, as near as may be, the same conditions, at every stage of their career, may yet differ almost to the point of grotesqueness. These differences are equally pronounced among a litter of puppies, where the uniformity of environment and training even more nearly approaches to identity, and so it is with nearly every species of animal. When we contemplate the intimate relation which we now know to exist between mind and body—not only so far as intellectual capacity is concerned but also in matters of emotion and impulsive force—it is seen to be as absurd to argue that one can have the nature and character he chooses as that he can have the colour of hair or length of limb which seems to him desirable. There are, for instance, fundamental and unalterable differences in impulse and, therefore, in character, between the man with a well-developed pituitary gland and the man with an ill-developed one ; and the emotions and psychic needs of the woman with a normal thyroid gland differ from those of the hypo- thyroidic. It is untrue to speak of these individuals as being equally free to attain a common ideal of character. At the same time, we must not, as is so often done, adopt a fatalistic attitude, and base our lives on the principle that what is is, and what will be will be.