judgment and breadth of insight. Utterly depraved, mean, vindictive, licentious, cruel, and false.”
There is not a shadow of justification in biological theory for asserting that most of these traits are genetically predetermined. A man’s energy may depend upon his native biological endowments, but what makes him “restless” or “ambitious,” zealous in war or in study, emphatically does not. Sexual power may be rooted in inherited glands, but it is the height of absurdity to regard “chastity,” that is, marital fidelity, or “licentiousness,” that is, the pursuit of other people’s wives—which is the way Wood uses these terms—as glandular predispositions. There is no reason to assume that St. Augustine’s glands changed when he abandoned his concubines for the Church and a life of celibacy.
Even about the moot question of “intelligence” Wood is no more persuasive. For, in the main, the sign of intelligence for him is success—“intelligence means the practical acquisition of wealth and power.” He infers its inherent presence or absence only from the success or failure in acquiring power. The inference might be legitimate if the opportunities to acquire power as between monarch and monarch, and monarch and commoner, were the same. But Wood does not venture to assert this except for the misty period of prehistory, concerning which Hegel once remarked that we can be most certain of what we know least about.
In evaluating the comparative significance of heredity and environment in developing the traits of monarchs and in generating the opportunities for the exercise of these traits, Wood resolutely plays down environmental influence. He even denies that monarchs have had better opportunities to develop their talents than have commoners, asserting that whatever superior advantages they enjoyed have been more than compensated for by greater disadvantages. Among the reasons he offers for his conclusion that royal eminence is a gift of nature rather than of society is that monarchs as a class have had greater success in government than their ministers. “…[T]he total number of statesmen alleged to be great is less than the total number of monarchs. Opportunity may have [!] helped the monarchs more than the ministers, but as differences of opportunity are shown by other tests to be usually of slight causative value [!], it is not at all likely that such differences would account for the vast differences in numerical ratios—differences that make it thousands of times more likely than among
