The groundwork of eugenics / by Karl Pearson.

  • Pearson, Karl, 1857-1936.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

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

Credit: The groundwork of eugenics / by Karl Pearson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE GROUNDWORK OF EUGENICS 5 It can only be properly discussed after we have measured the present state of our knowledge, and are able to estimate its relation to our existing social organisation. Before dis¬ cussing practical eugenics we must know the relative weight of nature and nurture, of heredity and race, of environment and training. These are wide subjects, on which at present —even if we confine our attention to man—we have only partial knowledge. Some phases of what we do know will be discussed in the later lectures, and when these are con¬ cluded we can return with greater fitness to what is feasible in practical eugenics. Meanwhile I return to my point that, while the student of eugenics can make no direct experiments on man, he can observe those experiments which mankind is every day on so vast a scale making upon itself. And he has to observe those experiments in the calm scientific manner of the physician in his clinic; he must not be led away to imme¬ diate action by the first individual case, which appeals to his sympathy and emotions. The general rule can only be learnt when the statistics of many individual cases have been dealt with. Each characteristic, each virtue and each vice is protean in its forms, and not until we have massed case upon case in our experience can we deduce the general drift of the whole series. I would illustrate this by an attempt to consider some of the sources of feeble-mindedness in the children of the industrial classes made to my knowledge quite recently in a large manufacturing town. The family history of several hundred mentally defective children was followed up with considerable energy and success. The result was that a most striking amount of alcoholism was demonstrated to exist in the ancestry, and it was supposed that this investi¬ gation confirmed the view that alcoholism in the parent