PARTISAN REVIEW
survey, this accumulation of data, has never, even on its upper
educational levels, been properly instructed in the most elementary
principles of scientific thought. With this public, science is authority.
It has been trained to accept heedlessly "what science says," which
it conceives to be a unitary utterance. To this public nothing is more
valuable, more precisely "scientific" and more finally convincing,
than raw data without conclusions; no disclaimer of conclusiveness
can mean anything to it-it has learned that the disclaimer is simply
the hallmark of the scientific attitude, science's way of saying "thy
unworthy servant."
So that if the Report were really, as it claims to be, only an
accumulation of objective data, there would be some question of
the cultural wisdom of dropping
it
in a lump on the general public.
But in point of fact, it is full of assumption and conclusion; it makes
very positive statements on highly debatable matters and it editorial–
izes very freely. This preliminary survey gives some very conclusive
suggestions to a public that is quick to obey what science says, no
matter how contradictory science may be, which is most contradic–
tory indeed. This is the public that, on scientific advice, ate spinach
in one generation and avoided it in the next, that in one decade
trained its babies to rigid Watsonian schedules and believed that
affection corrupted the infant character, only to learn in the next
decade that rigid discipline was harmful and that cuddling was as
scientific as induction.
Then there is the question of whether the Report does not do
harm by encouraging people in their commitment to mechanical
attitudes toward life. The tendency to divorce sex from the other
manifestations of life is already a strong one. This truly absorbing
study of sex in charts and tables, in data and quantities, may have
the effect of strengthening the tendency still more with people who
are by no means trained to invert the process of abstraction and to
put the fact back into the general life frqm which it has been taken.
And the likely mechanical implications of a statistical study are in
this case supported by certain fully formulated attitudes which the
authors strongly hold.
These, I believe, are valid objections to the book's indiscrim–
inate circulation. And yet I also believe that there is something good
about the manner of publication, something honest and right. Every
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