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It was one of our commonplace sayings that we must "get back to nature," get away from the walled city into the open country, revert from the conditions of civilization in a considerable degree to those of barbarism, in order to escape. While, as for heredity, its influence was almost dead against us.
Heredity plus environment, in these we find the keynote of the great productions of the leader of the "naturalistic" school of fiction. It has been said that art, in itself, should have no moral. It has been further charged that the tendencies of some of Zola's works are hurtful. But, in the books of this master, the aberrations of vice are nowhere made attractive, or insidiously alluring.
Thus heredity is a just principle which has been badly applied. There is something in that word as in many others. Each one takes it by one end and no one understands the other. The science of psychology will remain where it lies, that is to say in shadows and folly, as long as it has no exact nomenclature, so long as it is allowed to use the same expression to signify the most diverse ideas.
Guessed at by Goethe a hundred years ago, but not expressed in definite form until formulated by Lamarck in the beginning of the present century, it was at last, thirty years ago, decisively established by Charles Darwin, his theory of selection filling up the gap which Lamarck in his doctrine of the reciprocal influence of heredity and adaptation had left open.
We have seen that not one of the characteristics examined is inherent, that is, due to brain structure, to biological heredity. We have concluded, therefore, that the psychical characteristics which differentiate races are all but wholly social. It is incumbent on advocates of the biological view to point out in detail the distinguishing inherent traits of the Orient.
It may be necessary to remind some of those kind enough to read the foregoing that the words "soul," "self," "ego," "transmigration," "heredity," although freely used by me, convey meanings entirely foreign to Buddhist philosophy, "Soul," in the English sense of the word, does not exist for the Buddhist. "Self" is an illusion, or rather a plexus of illusions.
The children of the good are too often bad and the children of the bad too often good to permit us to dogmatize about heredity. We learn as our experience deepens and our horizon widens to regard such collapses with a compassionate sympathy and a humbled consciousness of our own unfitness to judge and condemn.
The time when systematic instruction in military exercises and in the use of arms shall form part of every youth's education has not yet arrived, but the necessity for some such step looms already on the horizon. Cf. chap. ii. Cf. Principles of Heredity, ibid. p. 242. Cf. next chapter. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 292. Ibid. p. 329.
But the balanced meal is a gastronomic catastrophe that can only be processed by the very young with high digestive vitality, the exceptionally vital of any age, people with cast iron stomachs which usually refers to their good heredity, and those who are very physically active.
No theory can alter these discrepancies, so that democratic doctrines will remain confined to words until the laws of heredity consent to unify the capacities of men. Can we suppose that societies will ever succeed in establishing artificially the equality refused by Nature? A few theorists have believed for a long time that education might effect a general levelling.
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