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But starting out with a particular human being, we can learn to treat him in such a way as to make him develop into a more desirable person than he would become if he were neglected or if he were treated differently. And that is the main problem, after all. The relation between heredity and environment may perhaps be made clear by an extreme illustration from the physical side.
Dale certainly owed his methodical habits to his mechanical training, but whence he derived and how he maintained his exuberance and spontaneity has often puzzled me. He himself accounts for it on the score of heredity, in that an ancestress of his married a highwayman who was hanged at Tyburn under William and Mary. In person Lady Kynnersley is lean and blanched and grey-haired.
Yet they would not even consider it in a second reading. They are satisfied with their ignorance. They have nothing to learn. Hereditary legislators! There would be more propriety in hereditary professors of mathematics! Heredity is a great success with only one kind of creature. "'What creature? I asked. "'The ass, he answered, with as serious a countenance as I have seen him wear.
In the coming contest over the great question of psychological evolution, common intelligence will follow Science along the line of least resistance; and that line will doubtless be the study of heredity, since the phenomena to be considered, however in themselves uninterpretable, are familiar to general experience, and afford partial answers to countless old enigmas.
When we think of the enormous number of variations, all in the same direction, that we must suppose to be accumulated before the passage from the pigment-spot of the Infusorian to the eye of the mollusc and of the vertebrate is possible, we do not see how heredity, as we observe it, could ever have determined this piling-up of differences, even supposing that individual efforts could have produced each of them singly.
It is a declaration of a new power in human life, and a record of its achievements. It is this, and nothing else. The one great word of that gospel is Faith not faith in a formula or an institution, but faith in the absolute supremacy of spirit. Faith in spirit means power power over circumstance, power over matter, power over the heredity of our animal origin.
Godwin used the new psychology against the old superstition of innate ideas. A modern thinker in his place would advance Weissmann's biological theory that the acquired modifications of an organism are not inherited, as an answer to the pessimism which bases itself upon heredity. Godwin starts boldly with the thesis that "the characters of men originate in their external circumstances."
The natural inequality of men instead of being mitigated by law or custom is everywhere strengthened and increased by a thousand effete social distinctions. Even in the best class where a certain easy familiarity reigns there is circle above circle, and the summits are isolated by heredity.
The whole conception rests on the social instinct's inhibitions of the acquisitive instinct and in the growth and strength of feelings of conscience and duty as previously described. Social heredity and tradition operate very powerfully in the matter of this kind of honesty; to steal, as we see it, from neighboring tribes is ethical for savage races, and even to steal such property as women.
The little man is the well," turning to Truesdale, "there are the general data; make your own application of them." "I see," said Truesdale; "my people are naturally against the governing powers anyway, from instinct and heredity; even when one of them does attain official position, it is only the position of the worm in the apple.
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