BOOKS and OTHER THINGS

It is peculiarly true of human nature that "the more it changes, the more it's the same thing." Men used to call upon religion to support any system that was to their advantage. They had divine revelations about the place of women in society, the privileges of kings and upper classes, and so forth. But during the nineteenth century, in the Occident, the prestige of theology waned, while that of science increased. So now all the old prejudices are being refitted with imitation "scientific" bases. Some of them can still be kept up, although they are dangerously wabbly. Some are rather in the nature of museum exhibits.

Blaming It on The Feminists

E. R. Hickey directs our attention to a striking example. In "The New Criminology" (Liveright), by Dr. Max Schlapp and Edward H. Smith, the authors attribute criminal propensities and acts to a congenitally faulty endocrinal condition that is to something wrong with the various ductless glands of the body, owing to an unfortunate heredity. And this evil inheritance the writers unhesitatingly trace to the prenatal environment. If women are suffering from grave emotional or physical stresses during the period of expectant motherhood the result is an endocrine disturbance which again results in physically and mentally defective offspring, and so at last in the whole calender of crime from petty larceny to murder. And the underlying cause is "feminism"! They make the charge explicitly:

We come again upon feminish and its allied evil, industrialian. The general participation of women and the economic struggle has as a wide-spread emotional discouraging of the female organism, a common predisposition to hysteria and nervous explosiveness. The restlessness of women, their baneful pushing into activities for which they are biologically not suited, and the resultant rise in the numbers of congenital defectives, are all fruits of this tree."

It is regreters be that the authority of science should be to obtain a hearing for such dogmatising, yet it is unavoidable. While science was unremunerative and even hazardous, few but the truly scientific minds were attracted to its pursuit. Working patiently and slowly, and confining their theorizing to the field of science proper, where theories must stand up to every devisable proof, these great scientists discovered many fundamental laws of physics and chemistry, from which flowed the immense mechanical progress of our own times. Quite incidentally to their pursuit of truth, they enriched the world materially to an immense extent; and even more incidentally, they made it possible for "scientific investigators" to earn a living as such. The various branches of science are no longer a vocation; they are split into a diversity of professions. This was inevitable. A merely ordinary intelligence can use the technique which only a fine scientific mind could have devised. The main differences will be seen in the theorizing and the application.

What Is a Scientific Fact?

Huxisy defined a scientific fact as something which will invariably occur in given circumstances. I paraphrase the definition, not having the source at hand. Merely to suggest the imposition of a scientific test to the Schiapp-Smith ideas is to show their fantastic nature.

For instance, the strictest necessity a true scientific method is to avoid assuming that a merely coincident factor or condition is a cause. To prove scientificaly that crime is due to endocrinal defects, one would have to show not only that all criminals are defective in that respect, but that all endocrinal defectives are criminals! It may be so, but it is far from proved.

Further, it may be true that these congenital defectives are doomed because their mothers suffered emotional or physical stress during the antenatal period. It must be allowed as a hypothesis, because any hypothesis is allowable when the facts are as yet unknown. But unless the number of endocrinal defectives (and consequently of criminals) is enormously large, it is not extremely plausible . Few mothers escape grave occasion for worry, and most of them are obliged to perform rather laborious tasks during the critical period. There has been a marked advance in this respect within recent years, still, ideal conditions are anything but general. If worry and hard work on the part of the mother resulted in idiocy and criminality in the child, the world would be rather worse off than it now is. In fact, it would