The academic aspect of the science of national eugenics : a lecture delivered to undergraduates / by Karl Pearson.

  • Karl Pearson
Date:
1911
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The academic aspect of the science of national eugenics : a lecture delivered to undergraduates / by Karl Pearson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/52 (page 15)
    THE SCIENCE OF NATIONAL EUGENICS 15 even then, how fluctuating is the whole body of scientific knowledge ! The names of many things have changed since my college days of thirty-five years ago ; the laboratory processes have changed, and as for scientific hypotheses, the whole foundations of science, physical and biological, have been reconstructed—no, that is saying too much—they have been dug up, and we hope a strong logical mind will come along some day and recon¬ struct them. Matter and force have had their day, the atom as a fundamental unit, and mass as an invariable constant, have had their day, the nebular hypothesis has had its day ; the electron is having its day, and Mendelism ' is having its day, and inoculation and the opsonic index are having their day, but who can doubt that their day will be yesterday as we march along ? If the student comes out of the lecture-room untrained to doubt, then his education is inefficient. The education which does not cause you to question, to doubt at every stage, is not doing its duty by you. Please understand that I have not a grain of sympathy with those who think it fashionable to doubt every convention, whether in science or in art or social conduct. The mere existence of a convention is strong evidence that there is something to be said in favour of it—that it supplies, or at least has supplied, some aid to conduct, or provided some economy of thought. If you come out of the lecture-room ready to accept some hypothesis as effectively describing facts on the authority of your teacher, then that lecture has been perfectly idle from the true academic standpoint. It would be equally idle if you came out with the conviction that it did not fit the facts. The only healthy attitude is to come out as a doubter, ready to accept nobody's