Chapter 2

These observations must, of course, be submitted to strict examination before science will pronounce its opinion. Meanwhile I may be allowed to cite what Dr. Kidd calls an "undesigned experiment," which to my mind goes far to prove that the effects of prolonged friction on the human body during many generations is not heritable. The custom followed by many Bantu tribes of producing in their women an elongation of the genital parts by constant manipulation must have been practiced during very many generations, certainly much longer than the comparatively recent harnessing of horses in England, for we know how tenaciously primitive people cling to their old customs, generation after generation, for thousands of years, and yet no instance has ever been noticed by these people, who are very observant in these matters, of any sign of such an inherited characteristic in any of their female children.

The ordinary layman, though he may feel strongly interested in the problems of heredity and evolution, has seldom the leisure or the opportunity for the careful study of biological data, and he must therefore leave these to the specialists in scientific enquiry, but he is by no means precluded from using his own common-sense in drawing conclusions from the ordinary plain facts of life observable around him. It is when we come to consider this most important question in its bearing upon the mental side of the human being that the ordinary layman feels himself to be no less competent to form an opinion than the trained man of science.

Is it possible, then, we ask, for the parent whose intellect has been developed through training in his lifetime to transmit to his children any portion of this acquired increment of mental capacity, or, putting the question in more concrete terms, is it possible for a parent to transmit to his offspring any part of that power to increase the size and quality of the brain which may be assumed to have resulted in his own case from mental exercise? The question must not be misunderstood. We do not ask whether clever parents do as a rule have clever children; what we want to know is whether the successive sharpening of the wits of generations of people does, or does not, eventually result in establishing a real and cumulative asset of mental capacity.

Seeing that universal education has only come about within the latter part of the last century it must be clear that the vast majority of the present generation of educated Europeans are descended from people who never had any of that education which so many people nowadays regard as essential to the development and growth of the intellectual powers. But although education has only recently become, in various degrees, common to all white people, the light of learning has always been kept burning, however dimly at times, in certain places and circles, and it may, perhaps, be possible to find people to-day who are the descendants of those favoured few who have enjoyed, during many unbroken generations, the privilege of liberal education. Now let us assume that there are at present a small number of such people in the forefront of the intellectual activity of the day, and then let us ask ourselves whether these leaders of thought who can claim long lineal descent from learned ancestors show any mental capacity over and above that which is displayed by those commoners who are also in the foremost ranks of thought and science, but who cannot lay claim to such continuous ancestral training.

If we admit the existence of two such separate classes to-day then the answer must surely be that there is no mental difference discernible between them. But I think we may safely conclude that there has been very little of the kind of descent here presumed. It would be well-nigh impossible to find people who could prove an unbroken lineage of educated forbears going back more than four hundred years. During the middle ages the monks of the Church were the chief and almost sole depositories of education and learning, and as they were bound by their vows to life-long celibacy there could be no transmission from them to posterity of any of that increased capacity of brain which we are supposing as having been acquired by each individual through his own mental exertion. We know, of course, that there were frequent lapses from the unnatural restraint imposed on these men so that some of them may have propagated their kind, but such illegitimate offspring was not likely to remain within the circle of learning and therefore could not perpetuate the line. We of to-day know full well that the son of the common labourer whose forefathers had no education can, with equality of opportunity, achieve as much and travel as far in any field of mental activity as can the scion of the oldest of our most favoured families.

There does not seem to have been any augmentation of human brain power since written records of events were begun. Indeed it would seem rather as if there had been in many places a decrease in intellectual capacity, as when we compare the fellahin of modern Egypt with their great ancestors whom they resemble so closely in physical appearance that there can be little doubt about the purity of their descent. The same may be said about the modern descendants of the people who created "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." And when we consider the period of the Renaissance we cannot say that civilised man of to-day is superior to those people who after centuries of stagnation and general illiteracy were yet able to seize and develop the long-forgotten wisdom and philosophy of antiquity.

To go still further back and to venture beyond the historical horizon into the dim past when prehistoric man roamed over Europe is a task manifestly beyond the powers of the ordinary layman, and here we must, perforce, trust ourselves to the guidance of those students whose training and special learning entitle them to speak with authority.

The so-called Piltdown skull which was discovered in 1912 is accepted as representing the most ancient of human remains yet found in England, its age being estimated at somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 years. In discussing the size and arrangement of the lobes and convolutions of the brain which this cranium must have contained, Dr. Arthur Keith, who is admittedly the highest authority on the subject to-day, makes the following statement: "Unfortunately our knowledge of the brain, greatly as it has increased of late years, has not yet reached the point at which we can say after close examination of all the features of a brain that its owner has reached this or that status. The statement which Huxley made about the ancient human skull from the cave of Engis still holds good of the brain: 'It might have belonged to a philosopher or might have contained the thoughtless mind of a savage.' That is only one side of our problem, there is another. Huxley's statement refers to the average brain, which is equal to the needs of both the philosopher and the savage. It does not in any way invalidate the truth that a small brain with a simple pattern of convolutions is a less capable organ than the large brain with a complex pattern. If then we find a fairly large brain in the Piltdown man, with an arrangement and development of convolutions not very unlike those of a modern man, we shall be justified in drawing the conclusion that, so far as potential mental ability is concerned, he has reached the modern standard. We must always keep in mind that accomplishments and inventions which seem so simple to us were new and unsolved problems to the pioneers who worked their way up from a simian to a human estate."

In his concluding remarks upon this important find, Dr. Keith iterates his opinion: "Although our knowledge of the human brain is limited--there are large areas to which we can assign no definite function--we may rest assured that a brain which was shaped in a mould so similar to our own was one which responded to the outside world as ours does. Piltdown man saw, heard, felt, thought and dreamt much as we still do. If the eoliths found in the same bed of gravel were his handiwork, then we can also say he had made a great stride towards that state which has culminated in the inventive civilisation of the modern western world."[13]

Professor Herbert Donaldson of the University of Chicago, gives it as his opinion that "In comparing remote times with the present, or in our own age, races which have reached distinction with those which have remained obscure, it is by no means clear that the grade of civilisation attained is associated with a corresponding enlargement in the nervous system, or with an increase in the mental capabilities of the best representatives of those communities."[14]

Now while the ordinary man is unable to pronounce judgment upon expert opinion he is quite capable of understanding the main arguments upon which the foregoing conclusions are based. We all realise the truth of the old saying "Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte." We all appreciate the tremendous difficulty of taking the first step in the way of discovery and invention. We know that to be the first to step forward in an utterly new direction or venture; to be the first to work out, without any guidance or previous education, the first principles, however simple, in the doing, or thinking out of anything new, requires a mental audacity and astuteness that predicate a brain capacity as great as that which enables modern man to apply and develop the accumulated knowledge available in the text-books of to-day. Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace held strongly to this opinion. He could see no proof of continuously increasing intellectual power; he thought that where the greatest advance in intellect is supposed to have been made this might be wholly due to the cumulative effect of successive acquisitions of knowledge handed down from age to age by written or printed books; that Euclid and Archimedes were probably the equals of any of our greatest mathematicians of to-day; and that we are entitled to believe that the higher intellectual and moral nature of man has been approximately stationary during the whole period of human history. This great and intrepid thinker states his view with characteristic incisiveness thus: "Many writers thoughtlessly speak of the hereditary effects of strength or skill due to any mechanical work or special art being continued generation after generation in the same family, as amongst the castes of India. But of any progressive improvement there is no evidence whatever. Those children who had a natural aptitude for the work would, of course, form the successors of their parents, and there is no proof of anything hereditary except as regards this innate aptitude. Many people are alarmed at the statement that the effects of education and training are not hereditary, and think that if that were really the case there would be no hope for improvement of the race; but close consideration will show them that if the results of our education in the widest sense, in the home, in the shop, in the nation, and in the world at large, had really been hereditary, even in the slightest degree, then indeed there would be little hope for humanity, and there is no clearer proof of this than the fact that we have not _all_ been made much worse--the wonder being that any fragment of morality, or humanity, or the love of truth or justice for their own sakes still exists among us."[15]

I think the majority of thoughtful people will agree that these words express their own observations. Every day we see how children have to be taught to act and behave. We see continually how parents have to put pressure on their children to make them accept and apply those moral principles and mental valuations which have guided their lives and the lives of thousands of generations before them. We know only too well that children do not inherit the moral standards of right and wrong of their parents, and that to establish these principles in the young is a matter of protracted and often painful inculcation. The proved maxim that honesty is the best policy is still being literally hammered into the children of to-day who seem to find it no easier to follow the better way than did the children of the past. If mental modifications acquired by the parents were in any degree transmissible to the offspring then there would be no need for this constant repetition of the same process in every new generation.

The earliest indubitable man hitherto discovered was fully evolved when first met with, he was _homo sapiens_. By means of his human intelligence this frail, unspecialized being became in a sense the very lord of creation, for instead of remaining, like the animals, entirely subject to his surroundings he subjected his surroundings to himself. By means of this intelligence man was enabled to break away from the absolute rule of the law of natural selection which punishes with extinction all those types that fail in fitness for survival in the struggle for existence, so that, unlike the animals that die out when their particular structure does not fit in with their environment, man by means of his thinking brain was able to equip himself with parts of his environment, and thus to become its master. The process of evolution ceased to affect directly this creature who had a brain that could think, and ever since that brain was given to him man has remained unmoved and stationary above and apart from all other living things. All this is implied in the command, "Be ye fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it."

But though man became almost emancipated from the direct servitude of natural selection, he still is, and always will be, subject to the law of heredity. Man is made up of a group of innate characters inherited from a very mixed ancestry, these characters, being innate, are transmissible to his offspring, but such characters as are acquired by the parent through the direct influence of education or other environment, not being innate are not transmissible to his children. But in so far as a new development of latent and innate characters, through the influence of the environment, may help or hinder certain types in propagating themselves, the race may, perhaps, be modified through such influence by the process of gradual elimination of the types that lack the characters that prove to be of survival value in a particular locality. This we may suppose might happen where a number of Europeans, composed half of blondes and half of brunettes, come to live in a tropical country, if it be proved that the comparative darkness of the brunettes afford them better protection against inimical light and heat than the fair skin of the blondes, so that the former would on the average, enjoy better health and live longer, and therefore have more children than the latter, whereby, in course of time, the appearance of these people would be modified in respect of the general complexion of their skin. This, it is easy to see, would not mean the acquisition of a new and heritable means of protection, but only a development in each individual of an already present innate character that happened to be well fitted for survival in a certain climatic zone.

In order, therefore, to obtain any direct modification of the race in the way of mental improvement the physical effect of education must be such as to ensure longer life and with it, the concomitant chance of greater fertility for those who are educated against those who are not, so that the latter would tend to die out while the former would continue to increase their numbers. In other words, education must prove to be of survival value. Seeing that where education has increased most the birth-rate has tended to decrease it seems clear that we cannot regard continuous mental training as a favourable factor in the competition of propagation of human varieties.

If then we accept the conclusion that the effects of individual experience are not cumulatively hereditary we shall cease to cavil at the fact that there has been no anatomical or structural progress in the human body or brain since the time when men first became social and civilised beings, that is to say, since they first began to work together with their heads and hands, and we shall see that that which was to be expected has always happened, in that, from the earliest historical times to the present day, human life has been as the rolling and unrolling of a carpet. Cycles of civilisations, all essentially similar, have been evolved, one after another, to endure for a while and then to fade away, leaving the raw material of human kind as it was from the beginning. There is no evidence of any advancement in physique, intellect or moral character. The leaders of mankind were the law-givers, whether they were witch doctors, priests, chiefs, prophets or kings, and they all sought to establish their laws by claiming supernatural delegation and authority. With writing came the codes, and when we compare the statutes of Hammurabi, who flourished about 2,200 years B.C., with those compiled by his successors, Moses, Solon, Justinian and Napoleon, we find in them all evidence of the same mental appreciation and capacity in dealing with the social conditions and problems of their respective periods. The greatest products of art are still met with in the sculptured forms of ancient Greece, those images of serene beauty which may be imitated but not excelled. The reasoning powers of the ancient philosophers who, long before Christ was born, debated the still unanswered riddles of existence, when we compare the paucity of data on which they had to work with the wealth of knowledge now available, must be ranked as high as the intellectual ability of our foremost thinkers of to-day. In mechanical proficiency the world has indeed advanced to an astonishing extent, but the perfection of our modern machinery means only a gradual and very recent advance upon earlier methods and does not denote a corresponding development in the mind itself. The Greeks had no machinery to speak of, neither had the English in the days of Shakespeare and Newton, but who can doubt that the engineers of those times would have been equal to the task of understanding and applying the principles of modern mechanics had the necessary books been available to them? We do not assume that because the modern Germans excel as chemists they are therefore blessed with higher reasoning ability than were the contemporaries of Socrates and Plato who had no knowledge of the science of chemistry. The conclusion forced upon us after a sober and impartial survey of the facts of history is that, although the intellectual output of the world is always increasing, the intellect itself remains unaltered. Knowledge, we see, is after all, only descriptive, never fundamental. We can describe the appearance and condition of a process, but not the way of it, and though knowledge has come in rich abundance, wisdom still lingers.

The foregoing argument shows that the alleged mental superiority of the European cannot be due to constant use or education, so that it now becomes necessary for those who maintain that it nevertheless exists to prove, not only that the white man's intellectual capacity is now superior but to prove also that from the beginning it has always been stronger and better than that of the African Native, or, in other words, those who believe that the white race has inherent mental superiority must prove innate inferiority in the mental make-up of the Native.

There is a more or less indefinite notion abroad that the Bantu languages, as compared with those of Europe, are but poor and ineffective vehicles for the conveyance of abstract ideas, wherefore the capacity to form and entertain such ideas may be taken to be innately inferior in the Native brain. That the language of a people embodies, so to speak, in objective form the intellectual progress made by it is certainly true, and it will be well, therefore, to state briefly the actual and potential value of the Native speech as compared with that of the whites.

The living and the dead languages of the world have been classified by philologists into three main types of linguistic morphology; the isolating, like Chinese; the agglutinative, like Turkish and Bantu, and the inflective, like Latin. It was customary not long ago to look upon these three types as steps in a process of historical development, the isolating representing the most primitive form of speech at which it was possible to arrive, the agglutinative coming next in order as a type evolved from the isolating, and the inflective as the latest and so-called highest type of all. But since the matter has been carefully studied it has been admitted that there is no satisfactory evidence for believing in any evolution of linguistic types. English is now considered to be an isolating language in the making while Chinese is cited by authoritative European scholars as being a language which with the simplest possible means at its disposal can express the most technical or philosophical ideas with absolute freedom from ambiguity and with admirable conciseness and direction.[16]