The ethic of freethought; a selection of essays and lectures
by Karl Pearson
A eugenicist who applied his social Darwinism to entire nations, Pearson saw war against “inferior races” as a logical implication of the theory of evolution.
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“Taken on the average, and regarding both sexes, this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population.”
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[spiritual] misery is too often the result of the first necessary step towards freedom of thought, namely, the complete rejection of all forms of dogmatic faith. It can only be dispelled by a recognition of the true meaning of the problem of life, the relation of the finite to the infinite. But in the very nature of this problem – as I have endeavored to express it tonight – lies a strange inexpressible pleasure; it is the apparently finite mind of man, which itself rules the infinite; it is human thought which dictates the laws of the universe; only what man thinks can possibly be. The very immensities which appal him, are they not in a sense his own creations? Nay, paradoxical as it may seem, there is much truth in the assertion, that: It is the mind if man which rules the universe. Freethought in making him master of his own reason renders him lord of the world. That seems to me the endless joy of the freethinker’s faith. It is a real and living faith, which creative, sympathetic, and above all, enthusiastic, is designed to be the creed of the future.
Chapter: The Sex-relations in Germany
…the conflict between man and woman only terminated with the complete subjection of the latter in the sixteenth century. What the Greeks had accomplished in the age of Pericles – the ‘domestication’ of women – the Germans achieved in the age of Luther.
was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics.[3][4] He founded the world’s first university statistics department at University College, London in 1911, and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics and meteorology. Pearson was also a proponent of social Darwinism and eugenics.[5] Pearson was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton.
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When the 23-year-old Albert Einstein started the Olympia Academy study group in 1902, with his two younger friends, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, his first reading suggestion was Pearson’s The Grammar of Science.
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Further, he stated, “…science is in reality a classification and analysis of the contents of the mind…” “In truth, the field of science is much more consciousness than an external world.” (Ibid., Ch. II, § 6) “Law in the scientific sense is thus essentially a product of the human mind and has no meaning apart from man.” (Ibid., Ch. III, § 4)[21]
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A eugenicist who applied his social Darwinism to entire nations, Pearson saw war against “inferior races” as a logical implication of the theory of evolution. “My view – and I think it may be called the scientific view of a nation,” he wrote, “is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races.”[22
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“History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan’s success depended.”[24]
Pearson was known in his lifetime as a prominent “freethinker” and socialist. He gave lectures on such issues as “the woman’s question” (this was the era of the suffragist movement in the UK)[25] and upon Karl Marx. His commitment to socialism and its ideals led him to refuse the offer of being created an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 1920 and also to refuse a knighthood in 1935.
In The Myth of the Jewish Race[26] Raphael and Jennifer Patai cite Karl Pearson’s 1925 opposition (in the first issue of the journal Annals of Eugenics which he founded) to Jewish immigration into Britain. Pearson alleged that these immigrants “will develop into a parasitic race. […] Taken on the average, and regarding both sexes, this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population”.[27]