Eugenics then and now / edited by Carl Jay Bajema.

Date:
[1976], ©1976
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Eugenics then and now / edited by Carl Jay Bajema. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    318 Hereditary Talent and Character miglit introduce prophets and high priests of civiHzation into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins. Men and women of the present day are, to those Ave might hope to bring into existence, Avhat the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties. The feeble nations of the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of mankind ; and even the best of these, so far as we know them, seem unequal to their work. The average culture of mankind is become so much higher than it was, and the branches of knowledge and history so various and extended, that few are capable even of comprehending the exigencies of our modern civilization ; much less of ful¬ filling them. We are living in a sort of intellectual anarchy, for the want of master minds. The general intellectual capacity of our leaders requires to be raised, and also to be differentiated. We Avant abler commanders, statesmen, thinkers, inventors, and artists. The natural qualifications of our race are no greater than they used to be in semi- barbarous times, though the conditions amid which we are born are vastly more complex than of old. The foremost minds of the present day seem to stagger and halt under an intellectual load too heavy for their powers. PART II. I HAVE shown, in my previous paper, that intellectual capacity is so largely transmitted bj»- descent that, out of every hundied sons of men distinguished in the open professions, no less than eight are found to have rivalled their fathers in eminence. It must be recollected iNoTK.—I take this opportunity of correcting a small erratvm in my last paper. The паше of fhe Huthor of the forthcoming Brief Biogra¬ phical Dictionary from which I quoted whould have been the Rev. Charles Hole, not Hone. that success of this kind implies the simultaneous inheritance of many points of character, in addition to mere intel¬ lectual capacity. A man must inherit good health, a love of mental work, a strong purpose, and considerable ambi¬ tion, in order to achieve successes of the high order of which we are speaking. The d eficiency of any one of these qualiti es would certainly be injurious, and pro¬ bably be fatal to his chance of obtaining great distinction. But more than this : the proportion we have arrived at takes 23