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These phenomena have no conceivable bearing on one another until heredity and memory are regarded as part of the same story. Identify these two things, and I know no phenomenon of heredity that does not immediately become infinitely more intelligible.
It is to Weismann that we owe precise and definite conceptions, if not of the nature of heredity, at least of the details of the process.
Uncle Victor knew it and he had been afraid. Maurice Jourdain knew it and he had been afraid. Perhaps Lindley Vickers knew it, too. There must be something in heredity. She thought: "If there is I'd rather face it. It's cowardly not to." Lindley Vickers had told her what to read. Herbert Spencer she knew. Haeckel and Ribot were in the London Library Catalogue at Greffington Hall.
The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man and is always talking about what he may do. Hence all the Zola heredity and Ibsen heredity that has been written in our time affects me as not merely evil, but as essentially ignorant and retrogressive.
This determining touch of the divine, which is no result of biological processes, but stands outside the limitations of heredity and environment and education, may manifest itself quite as well in one class as in another, for "God is no respecter of persons." As has been said before, there is no difference in degree as between immortal souls.
People are born selfish, and the laws of nature and heredity seem to ordain that it shall be so. Indeed a certain selfishness seems to be inseparable from any desire to live. The force of asceticism and of Stoicism is that they both appeal to selfishness as a motive.
The theory of original sin, that terrible heredity reviving with each creature born into the world, made no allowance as Science does for the corrective influences of education, circumstances and environment.
It thus follows that the adult will contain, along with its differentiated material, a certain amount of the original physical basis of heredity which still retains its original powers. This undifferentiated chromatin material originally possessed powers of producing a new individual, and of course it still possesses these powers, since it has remained dormant without alteration.
"What's the biggest snake you ever saw?" "Oh, bother the snakes! I am tired of them." But the children were never tired of them. Heredity again, for the snake was the worst enemy of arboreal man. "Daddy made soup out of a snake," said Laddie. "Tell us about that snake, Daddy." Children like a story best the fourth or fifth time, so it is never any use to tell them that they know all about it.
If I should give a few drops in half a glass of water, and order a teaspoonful at a time, I should fly in the face of something which no mortal man can conquer, sheer heredity. The grandfathers and great-grandfathers of these people took their physic on draft, the children must do likewise. Sometimes I even think the medicine would lose its effect if taken in any other way.
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