The statistics indicate at any rate a surprisingly low rate of
intelligence among the classes in which large families and uncontrolled
procreation predominate. Those of the lowest grade in intelligence
are born of unskilled laborers (with the highest birth rate in the
community); the next high among the skilled laborers, and so on to the
families of professional people, among whom it is now admitted that the
birth rate is voluntarily controlled.(3)
But scientific investigations of this type cannot be complete
until statistics are accurately obtained concerning the relation of
unrestrained fecundity and the quality, mental and physical, of the
children produced. The philosophy of Birth Control therefore seeks and
asks the cooperation of science and scientists, not to strengthen its
own "case," but because this sexual factor in the determination of
human history has so long been ignored by historians and scientists.
If science in recent years has contributed enormously to strengthen
the conviction of all intelligent people of the necessity and wisdom
of Birth Control, this philosophy in its turn opens to science in its
various fields a suggestive avenue of approach to many of those problems
of humanity and society which at present seem to enigmatical and
insoluble.
(1) Conklin, The Direction of Human Evolution, pp. 125,
126.
(2) The Glands Regulating Personality: A study of the
glands of internal secretion in relation to the types of
human nature. By Louis Berman, M. D., Associate in
Biological Chemistry, Columbia University; Physician to the
Special Health Clinic. Lenox Hill Hospital. New York:
1921.
(3) Cf Terman: Intelligence of School Children. New York
1919. p. 56. Also, "Is America Safe for Democracy?" Six
lectures given at the Lowell Institute of Boston, by William
McDougall, Professor of Psychology in Harvard College. New
York, 1921.
CHAPTER XI: Education and Expression
"Civilization is bound up with the success of that movement.
The man who rejoices in it and strives to further it is alive;
the man who shudders and raises impotent hands against it is
merely dead, even though the grave yet yawns for him in vain.
He may make dead laws and preach dead sermons and his sermons
may be great and his laws may be rigid. But as the wisest of
men saw twenty-five centuries ago, the things that are great
and strong and rigid are the things that stay below in the grave.
It is the things that are delicate and tender and supple that
stay above. At no point is life so tender and delicate and
supple as at the point of sex. There is the triumph of life."
Havelock Ellis
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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