Everybody who has trained himself to
physical exercises discovers the
extent of his muscular powers to a nicety. When he begins to walk, to row,
to use the dumb bells, or to run, he finds
to his great delight that his thews
strengthen, and his endurance of fatigue increases day after day. So long as
he is a novice, he perhaps flatters
himself there is hardly an assignable
limit to the education of his muscles; but the daily gain is soon discovered
to diminish, and at last it vanishes
altogether. His maximum performance
becomes a rigidly determinate quantity. He learns to an inch, how high or
how far he can jump, when he has attained the highest state of training. He
learns to half a pound, the force he can exert on the dynamometer, by
compressing it. He can strike a blow against the machine used to measure
impact, and drive its index to a certain graduation, but no further. So it is
in running, in rowing, in walking,
and in every other form of physical
exertion. There is a definite limit to the muscular powers of every man,
which he cannot by any education or exertion overpass.

This is precisely analogous to the experience that every student has had
of the working of his mental powers.
The eager boy, when he first goes to
school and confronts intellectual difficulties, is astonished at his progress.
He glories in his newly-developed mental grip and growing capacity for
application, and, it may be, fondly believes it to be within his reach to
become one of the heroes who have left their mark upon the history of the
world. The years go by; he competes in the examinations of school and
college, over and over again with
his fellows, and soon finds his place
among them. He knows he can beat such and such of his competitors; that
there are some with whom he runs
on equal terms, and others whose
intellectual feats he cannot even
approach. Probably his vanity still
continues to tempt him, by whispering in a new strain.

It tells him that classics, mathematics, and other subjects taught in
universities, are mere scholastic specialities, and no test of the more
valuable intellectual powers. It reminds him of numerous instances of
persons who had been unsuccessful in
the competitions of youth, but who
had shown powers in after-life that made them the foremost men of their
age. Accordingly, with newly furbished hopes, and with all the ambition of
twenty-two years of age, he leaves his University and enters a larger field
of competition. The same kind of experience awaits him here that he has
already gone through. Opportunities occur—they occur to every man—and
he finds himself incapable of grasping them. He tries, and is tried in many
things. In a few years more, unless he is incurably blinded by self-conceit,
he learns precisely of what performances he is capable, and what other
enterprises lie beyond his compass. When he reaches mature life, he is
confident only within certain limits, and knows, or ought to know, himself
just as he is probably judged of by the world, with all his unmistakeable
weakness and all his undeniable strength. He is no longer tormented into
hopeless efforts by the fallacious promptings of overweening vanity, but
he limits his undertakings to matters below the level of his reach, and finds
true moral repose in an honest conviction that he is engaged in as much
good work as his nature has rendered him capable of performing.

There's enough evidence supporting it in the Bell Curve as pertains to intelligence

In athletics, the West Africans are better sprinters, east africans are better marathon runners.

But the goal of ethics is to spray shit into your mouth in the most efficient way possible

Dumb, shortsighted, small-minded. Muscles aren't brains. Brains aren't muscles.

>his nature

Just embarrassing.

heh, he was a grumpy bugger but he was right about some things. he discovered that there's a pretty uniform sense of attraction by getting people to go out and rate women from repulsive to attractive, and found out everyone rates pretty much the same way. I think you probably want >>>/sci/ for this thought because he was a geneticist. (He's the one who helped Darwin with his work on incest in flowers after Darwin, who was his cousin, married another of their cousins, a Wedgewood, I think)
His descendant Charles Galton Darwin was even further reaching in his predictions though, writing a book called The Next Million years, on the expansion of the theory that it's easier to tell generalities than specifics from such experiments though. You could also look into the other branch of the family, the Huxleys, and read Julian Huxley's work on Evolution. I don't recommend reading Charles Darwin's work on flowers itself quite basically because it's so many volumes and far less fun than the other three.

plebs BTFO
Every tutor knows how difficult it Is to drive abstract conceptions, even of
the simplest kind, into the brains
of most people—how feeble and
hesitating is their mental grasp—how easily their brains are mazed—how
incapable they are of precision a
nd soundness of knowledge. It often
occurs to persons familiar with some
scientific subject to hear men and
women of mediocre gifts relate to one another what they have picked up
about it from some lecture—say at the Royal Institution, where they have
sat for an hour listening with delight
ed attention to an admirably lucid
account, illustrated by experiments of
the most perfect and beautiful
character, in all of which they expressed themselves intensely gratified and
highly instructed. It is positively painful to hear what they say. Their
recollections seem to be a mere chaos of mist and misapprehension, to
which some sort of shape and organization has been given by the action of
their own pure fancy, altogether alien to what the lecturer intended to
convey. The average mental grasp even of what is called a well-educated
audience, will be found to be ludicrously small when rigorously tested.

A gifted man is often
capricious and fickle before he selects his occupation, but when it has been
chosen, he devotes himself to it with a truly passionate ardour. After a man
of genius has selected his hobby, and
so adapted himself to it as to seem
unfitted for any other occupation in life, and to be possessed of but one
special aptitude, I often notice, with
admiration, how well he bears himself
when circumstances suddenly thrust him into a strange position. He will
display an insight into new conditions
, and a power of dealing with them,
with which even his most intimate friends were unprepared to accredit
him. Many a presumptuous fool has mistaken indifference and neglect for
incapacity; and in trying to throw a man of genius on ground where he was
unprepared for attack, has himself received
a most severe and unexpected
fall. I am sure that no one who has had the privilege of mixing in the
society of the abler men of any great
capital, or who is acquainted with the
biographies of the heroes of history,
can doubt the existence of grand
human animals, of natures pre-eminently noble,
of individuals born to be
kings of men

also excuse me the formatting but when I copypaste it, it comes out that way

The number of
idiots and imbeciles among the twenty million inhabitants of England and
Wales is approximately estimated at 50, 000, or as I in 400.
Dr Seguin, a
great French authority on these matters,
states that more than thirty percent
of idiots and imbeciles, put
under suitable instruction, have been
taught to conform to social and moral law, and rendered capable of order,
of good feeling, and of working like
the third
of an average man. He says
that more than forty per cent. have become capable of the ordinary
transactions of life, under friendly control; of understanding moral and
social abstractions, and of working like
two-thirds
of a man. And, lastly,
that from twenty-five to thirty per cent
come nearer and nearer to the
standard of manhood, till some of them will defy the scrutiny of good
judges, when compared with ordinary young men and women. In the order
next above idiots and imbeciles are a large number of milder cases
scattered among private families and kept out of sight, the existence of
whom is, however, well known to relatives and friends; they are too silly
to take a part in general society, but
are easily amused with some trivial,
harmless occupation.

>>7320162
You know you are not speaking about a book, this is abstract shit and is illegal on this board.

Saged