devils. The superstition is in the person who admits
there can be devils but denies there can be diabolists. Yet I should
certainly resist any effort to search for witches, for a perfectly
simple reason, which is the key of the whole of this controversy. The
reason is that it is one thing to believe in witches, and quite
another to believe in witch-smellers. I have more respect for the old
witch-finders than for the Eugenists, who go about persecuting the
fool of the family; because the witch-finders, according to their own
conviction, ran a risk. Witches were not the feeble-minded, but the
strong-minded--the evil mesmerists, the rulers of the elements. Many a
raid on a witch, right or wrong, seemed to the villagers who did it a
righteous popular rising against a vast spiritual tyranny, a papacy of
sin. Yet we know that the thing degenerated into a rabid and
despicable persecution of the feeble or the old. It ended by being a
war upon the weak. It ended by being what Eugenics begins by being.

When I said above that I believed in witches, but not in
witch-smellers, I stated my full position about that conception of
heredity, that half-formed philosophy of fears and omens; of curses
and weird recurrence and darkness and the doom of blood, which, as
preached to humanity to-day, is often more inhuman than witchcraft
itself. I do not deny that this dark element exists; I only affirm
that it is dark; or, in other words, that its most strenuous students
are evidently in the dark about it. I would no more trust Dr. Karl
Pearson on a heredity-hunt than on a heresy-hunt. I am perfectly ready
to give my reasons for thinking this; and I believe any well-balanced
person, if he reflects on them, will think as I do. There are two
senses in which a man may be said to know or not know a subject. I
know the subject of arithmetic, for instance; that is, I am not good
at it, but I know what it is. I am sufficiently familiar with its use
to see the absurdity of anyone who says, "So vulgar a fraction cannot
be mentioned before ladies," or "This unit is Unionist, I hope."
Considering myself for one moment as an arithmetician, I may say that
I know next to nothing about my subject: but I know my subject. I know
it in the street. There is the other kind of man, like Dr. Karl
Pearson, who undoubtedly knows a vast amount about his subject; who
undoubtedly lives in great forests of facts concerning kinship and
inheritance. But it is not, by any m