Eugenics in race and state.

  • International Congress of Eugenics
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Eugenics in race and state. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    383/534 (page 367)
    EDUCABILITY AND INHERITANCE 367 ously developed brain. In marked inferiority, on the other hand, some or all of these qualities are defective, and it is justifiable to conclude that this is due to some defect of brain structure or function. Let us first of all consider those cases in which mental development falls markedly below the normal average of the race and class to which the in¬ dividual belongs. It has been suggested that the various races of mankind were not evolved from a single pair of ancestors, or even from the same pre¬ human species, but that they are the descendants of different, although closely related species, which possessed fundamentally different potentiality for development. It is argued that these fundamental differences account not only for the differences in educability in regard to race, but that the mixture of these different races to form the nations which exist to-day accounts for the variations in educability amongst members of the same nation. In other words that defective mental development is either the expression of a defective potentiality which has existed ab initio or is due to atavism, or a harking back to a former condition. It is undoubtedly true that most nations are a blend of several different racial types, and this is certainly the case in the British and American nations; further, the phenomenon of atavism is well established; so that if we grant the h5фothe- sis of inherent racial differences of potentiality it is quite possible that some cases of defective educability might be thus explained as a throw back. It is to be remarked, however, that this is an hypothesis only; we have to remember that the black and yellow races are for the most part the descend¬ ants of peoples who have for many generations lived in surroundings little calculated to favor intellectual development; where the opposite conditions have prevailed, as for instance in the Chinese and Japanese, the degree of educability would not appear to be inferior to that of civilized whites. I shall refer to this matter again presently, but it is not improbable that these racial differences in educability are due to the continued lack of stimulus in the past rather than to any inherent germinal defect of developmental potentiality. It seems to me that in the majority of cases in which there is a marked failure to attain the degree of mental development which is normal to the class to which the individual belongs we have, not a condition of atavism, but one which is pathological, and due to germinal potentiality having in some way been impaired. In my opinion there is not the slightest doubt that this may actually take place. My enquiries into the causation of mental deficiency had led me to the conclusion that certain diseases of the individual (i.e., alcoholism tuberculosis and syphilis) may so devitalize and impair the potentiality of his, or her germ plasm as to prevent the normal