Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of SexThomas, William Isaac
Science
Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex
Thomas, William Isaac
Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Nature is not producing a better average brain than in the time of
Aristotle and the Greeks. If we have more than the wisdom of our
ancestors, our advantage lies in our specialization, our superior body
of knowledge, and our superior technique for its transmission. At the
same time, the individual brain is unstable, fluctuating in normal
persons between 1,100 and 1,500 grams in weight, while the extremes
of variation are represented, on the one side, by the imbecile with
300 grams, and the man of genius with 2,000 on the other. It is
therefore perfectly true that by artificial selection--Mr. Galton's
"eugenism"--a larger average brain could be created, and also a higher
average of natural intelligence, whether this be absolutely dependent
on brain weight or not. But it is hardly to be expected that a stable
brain above the capacity of those of the first rank now and in the
past will result, since the mutations of nature are more radical than
the breeding process of man, and she probably ran the whole gamut.
"Great men lived before Agamemnon," and individual variations will
continue to occur, but not on a different pattern; and what has been
true in the past will happen again in the future, that the group which
by hook or by crook comes into possession of the best technique and
the best copies will make the best show of intelligence and march at
the head of civilization.
III
The foregoing examination of the relation of the mental faculty of the
lower races to the higher places us in a position to examine to better
advantage the other question of the relation of the intelligence of
woman to that of man.
The differences in mental expression between the lower and the higher
races can be expressed for the most part in terms of attention and
practice. The differences in run of attention and practice are in this
case due to the development of different habits by groups occupying
different habitats, and consequently having no copies in common.
Woman, on the other hand, exists in the white man's world of practical
and scientific activity, but is excluded from full participation in
it. Certain organic conditions and historical incidents have, in fact,
inclosed her in habits which she neither can nor will fracture, and
have also set up in the mind of man an attitude toward her which
renders her almost as alien to man's interests and practices as if she
were spatially separated from them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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