ABSTRACT
If we look in that jar on the communal shelf today, we shall find there the extremely strange idea that to be free is to be indeterminate, that our having an innate constitution would destroy our freedom. Repeatedly of late, defenders of freedom have attacked scientists who were producing evidence that something in our emotional or intellectual capacities was inherited. I speak of these campaigners as ‘defenders of freedom’, because that is how they see themselves. They hold that these suggestions about our innate constitution simply have to be false-because, if they were true, they would make us slaves. Often they feel that even to discuss the possibility of innateness is so offensive to human dignity that such speakers must not be heard, that to hear their arguments patiently would commit us to political iniquities. Scientists, in replying to these attacks, often have not paid much attention to this belief,
because they have been busy in substantiating the particular facts which they have brought forward. But we must look at the interpretation before we can make sense of the facts. People who are convinced that something must not be true are in no state to take in the evidence for or against it.1
