Volume 1

Popular science / edited by Arthur Mee.

Date:
1912-1913
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Popular science / edited by Arthur Mee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    798/802 (page 768)
    and sundry, as they now do, that education develops but cannot create. But though the partisans of nurture in all its forms may be nonplussed by such demonstrations as modern education has afforded, they still have another and most important argument; and that involves us in the second proposition regarding the limits of nurture. It is supposed that if we educate the parents the child will begin where the parents left off. This assertion is notoriously contrary to the facts of every day. It depends upon the belief that the effects of use and disuse are transmitted to offspring, a belief which is at all times contradicted by the scantiest observation, but which becomes a complete obsession when we find it used for partisan purposes. Thus the advocates of votes for women —as to which nothing is here said for or against—declare that the political in capacity of women, alleged by their op ponents, is due to ages of disuse, and can not be recovered at once. This ridiculous but familiar argument assumes not merely that the effects of disuse are transmitted to offspring, but that they are exclusively transmitted to offspring of the same sex as the parent, it being forgotten that mothers have sons as well as daughters, and fathers have daughters as well as sons. The Efficiency that a Man can Never Transmit to His Children Neither the effects of use nor of disuse of any organ or faculty of the parental body are transmitted to the offspring. The sub ject has been carefully studied for decades, by all manner of means, and the fact has long ago been proved. It follows that all those forms of nurture, education, or “ the provision of an environment,” as we shall here define education, which involve no more than the use, practice, or develop ment of particular functions or organs, are impotent as regards the race. They serve individuals, which is their abundant justifi cation, notwithstanding the limits imposed, as we have already seen, upon that service. But they do not serve the race; and half the disappointments and failures of history are due to the delusion that they do. If the old view were true, as Lamarck supposed it was when he based a theory of evolution upon it, the provision of good nurture would be a completely adequate instrument of eugenics, and what we have called primary or natural eugenics would be superfluous. Even though good nurture would not reform the world in a single generation, owing to the individual limita tions imposed by the nature of the material, yet in each successive generation, on this view, the material would improve in herently, and by a kind of snowball process man would climb rapidly starwards. The good habits acquired, perhaps with pain and labour, by one generation would be innate, natural, inevitable in the next. Our parents’ nurture would become our nature, “ my father’s environment would be my heredity.” We should not need to discuss any question of selection for parent hood. Without any such process we could raise the race at once, as one storey of a building is built upon another. The Great Heritage that can Come Down Only Through Society Nothing of the sort happens. The results of education, physical, mental, or moral, are confined to the individuals educated. The personal acquirements of one generation, in speech or muscular development or in formation, die with their possessors. The children do not begin where the parents left off, but they make a fresh start where the parents did. The social heritage may be improved by the parents’ doings : in this sphere, thank Heaven and man’s power of recording his achievements, there is “ trans mission of acquired characters,” or where should any of us be ? But the germ- plasm of the individual who learns ten languages remains what it would otherwise have been, and his subsequent child, formed therefrom, has to begin at a, b, c like his father. True, the child may be a good linguist, but that is evidently because it has inherited the natural linguistic capacity which was inherent in its parent, and has had, probably, the further advantage of being brought up in a linguistic home. The Good Nurture that at least Protects the Nature of the Next Generation We proceed, then, in our study of nurture and our demands for its granting to every human life, but all the while we must steadily remember that what we ask for will never rightly repay us until the demands of primary or natural eugenics have been satisfied, and good nurture has nothing but good material to work upon. Lastly we note, however, that in certain special and well-defined cases our nurture is equivalent to protecting the nature of the next generation. These are the cases of the racial poisons, which can poison the germ-plasm if they enter the body of a future parent. The good nurture which protects the body from these forms of mal nutrition is thus of unique importance.