< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu
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393
PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMIT OF EUGENICS

heritance. Professor Ames, of Chicago, indicates something of the process of its acquirement:

Every human being, if he is to live at all, is, from infancy, surrounded and cared for by persons. These persons fit into and help constitute a social group. The child is nourished, sheltered, guided and disciplined by this human environment. All objects and influences are mediated by the persons near him. His very sensations are determined and modified by them.[1]

The old-time evolutionist and the modern eugenist alike make little of social control in their effort to make clear the biological control of social processes. To them environment is merely external.

Let us now turn briefly to the list quoted from Davenport: Poverty is a problem, but we may ask in the words of Professor Cooley, of Michigan:

What shall we say of the doctrine very widely, though perhaps not very clearly, held that the poor are the "unfit" in course of elimination?. . . The truth is that poverty is unfitness, but in a social and not a biological sense. That is to say, it means that feeding, housing, family life, education and opportunity are below the standards that the social type calls for, and that their existence endangers the latter in a manner analogous to the presence of inferior cattle in a herd endangers the biological type. . . . But since the unfitness is social rather than biological, the method of elimination must also be social, namely, reform of housing and neighborhood conditions, improvement of the schools, public teaching of trades, abolition of child labor and the humanizing of industry.[2]

The subject of sexual immorality is absorbing our attention these days. Flexner says that it

plainly is absurd to speak as if women took to prostitution simply because they were marked out for a vicious life by innate depravity or even forced into it by economic pressure.[3]

If this kind of immorality were inherent we should, according to their own confessions, begin with the elimination of the greatest moral teacher of the early church, St. Augustine, and the greatest stimulator of modern social ideals, Count Tolstoy. The sex mores of Russia today are very different from those of America, and from those of Tolstoy's youth, and from what they will be a generation hence, all without the slightest help from eugenics, solely by the psychic force of social control. To be sure a part of the prostitutes are feeble minded, but even they are prostitutes largely as a result of the mores of their group and the commercial demand for their services.

As to the criminalistic, Lombroso with great pains made an anthropological description of the criminalistic type, but scarcely a criminologist in Europe or America to-day accepts his conclusions, and the modern science of penology is based on the system of social control.

  1. ↑ Psychological Bulletin, VIII., p. 407.
  2. ↑ C. H. Cooley, "Social Organization," pp. 294, 296.
  3. ↑ Abraham Flexner, "Prostitution in Europe," quoted from The Survey, January 17, 1914.
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