In further illustration of the controversial character of issues in psychology which must find their illumination under biological principles, there is the eternal problem of the eternal feminine - the correct view of the differences in mental organization of men and women. For here are three vital determinations of original nature which shape the fate of humanity and the course of civilization - the race, the sex, the individual or familial stock.

The racial question is too complex for summary inclusion.1 The order, the extent, the interrelation of racial traits are all written somehow in the varieties of nervous organization: they are determinations of nature and cumulate with those of sex and stock. We reach the individual through common remote (racial) and immediate selective ancestry, everywhere differentiated by the (glandular) determinations of sex. Racial intermingling, as well as the large ancestral community of all races, served to obliterate differences. But such an experiment as transporting West African negroes to a wholly different environment still leaves intact the racial differentiations, as shown by the fact that the average I.Q. of the negroes drafted in the war was 10.4 years, while that of the mixed whites was 13.6 years. The capacity of races to adopt and adapt themselves to alien cultural environments is demonstrated by the same experiment.

The question of interpreting biologically the differential psychology of men and women comes back to that of secondary or derivative sexual characteristics. The physical differentia admit of no dispute; nor are we under the temptation of confusing conspicuousness with importance. That men have beards and women have none gives us no concern; if nature wills it that way, we accept the dispensation or nullify it with a razor. The functional differences we accept with equal calm, noting the different distinctions, such as liability to disease, or the varying emotional nature centering about the care of the child. But the intellectual sphere under the dominion of the highest orders of cortical organization presents a different problem, which has disturbed empires, created political entanglements, and turned economists, sociologists, psychologists, 1 For an example of its treatment under the guiding principles of modern psychology, see S. D. Porteus and M. E. Babcock, "Temperament and Race," Richard G. Badger, Publisher, Boston, 1926.

philosophers, and writers generally into propagandists,1 particularly in the intimate issue of the relation of the sexes which is pivotal to the quality of social life.

Achievement is an uncertain test of races for one reason, of the sexes for another; yet they are related. The social environment can go far to disqualify the status of women. The conforming power of social pressure is enormous; that alone is a testimony to the large truth of the environmental psychology. If one were to judge the relative intellectual ability of the two sexes by the frequency of their citation in a standard biographical dictionary, one would reach a conclusion contradicted by all biological evidence. Whatever the scale of difference between the masculine and the feminine intellect, it is not of that order. Opportunity, stimulation, expectation, supporting qualities, the place of career in the total scheme of life - social disqualification as well as original nature - all play a part in the disparity and leave an insoluble equation, because of too many unknown quantities.

But when the experimentalist compares the school ratings or college standings in a range of artificially selected abstract studies or in elections to Phi Beta Kappa, and concludes, because these are so nearly equalized in young men and young women students, that the commonly accepted views of the mental differences between men and women are the result of prejudices, hearsay, myth, and convention, he is greatly overestimating the value of his technique and as greatly neglecting the biological scale by which all such values must be gauged.

These scholastic tests are adventitious and tangential in any biological scale; they are not likely to touch the significant differences that support such remote applications 1 Sufficiently illustrated in the volume by various authors, edited by V. F. Calverton and S. D. Schmalhausen,"Sex and Civilization," Macaulay Company, New York, 1929.

of endowments. And even there it is far more significant that such selection as diminishes the proportion of women students in law and engineering to nearly zero, as determines what branches within the academic program attract women and in which they excel; that women in general are as musically inclined as men if not more so, yet few women become composers; that the stage arts in which personality counts, are the ones in which women hold their own; that by far fewer women carry their proficiencies (writers excepted, again in the field in which personalized human relations count) to a professional status - all this is certainly of far larger consequence than a set of proficiencies which happen to be more measurable by the aid of assumptions. The confusion of measurability with importance is the experimentalist's fallacy. It can be corrected only by loyalty to the scale - if we can but learn to read it - of nature's significance. The arguments thus suggested pro and con are fragmentary; they are sufficient to indicate an approach to the solution of the problem involved by way of a naturalistic appraisal. It will then be found that men and women are even more profoundly and variously different than we have yet discovered. How could it be otherwise, since the principle of physiological psychology is that bodily functions are reflected in psychic ones in all degrees of radiation; and there is no deeper and more pervasive physiological difference than that which divides human beings (abstractions) into men and women (as realities). Confusion results from neglect of this distinction. Such a principle as the Adlerian "masculine protest" is left floating in mid-air when applied to women. In the future we may recognize a masculine and a feminine psychology. The practical bearings of it all upon adapting the social and industrial arrangements of the world to the needs of men and women are vast. Circumstance will continue to shape institutions. But there is no problem that cannot be approached in the spirit of scientific inquiry, even that of the desirable relations between men and women.