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But if a man forges a cheque, or sets his house on fire, or robs with violence from the person, or does any other such things as are criminal in our own country, he is either taken to a hospital and most carefully tended at the public expense, or if he is in good circumstances, he lets it be known to all his friends that he is suffering from a severe fit of immorality, just as we do when we are ill, and they come and visit him with great solicitude, and inquire with interest how it all came about, what symptoms first showed themselves, and so forth, questions which he will answer with perfect unreserve; for bad conduct, though considered no less deplorable than illness with ourselves, and as unquestionably indicating something seriously wrong with the individual who misbehaves, is nevertheless held to be the result of either pre-natal or post-natal misfortune.
This is the Original Sin, inherited, innate, unacquired; for this are "babes span-long" to suffer, as the famous or infamous preacher declared. "Where, or at what time, was I ever innocent?" he cries, and hears no answer from "the dark backward and abysm" of the pre-natal life.
Yvette Stukeley returned to her uncle and guardian, General Sir Gerald Seymour Stukeley, K.C.B., K.C.S.I., at Monksmead, nursing a broken heart, and longed for the day when Colonel de Warrenne's child might be sent home to her care. The Major was an original student of theories and facts of Heredity and Pre-natal Influence.
You might long ago have studied pre-natal influences and the rights of the unborn. I hope you have not neglected these sacred duties. It surprised me that you wished for a girl, for not long ago you expressed the opinion that women were soulless creatures without memory! Suppose your daughter should not be an exception, how would you feel then?... You have been very active.
This is that better purity established by mothers in the plastic heart, before the superfoetation of precept is possible, or even before the "soul takes flight in language"; it is perhaps pre-natal or hereditary.
The theory is that in the minds of mature people there still remain certain vague memories of their pre-natal days in the maternal womb memories of a life which, though full of growing vigor and vitality, was yet at that time one of absolute harmony with the surroundings, and of perfect peace and contentment, spent within the body of the mother the embryo indeed standing in the same relation to the mother as St.
Strange that Nordau, in his "Conventional Lies of Civilisation," should echo this aspiration and gush over the Goethean Wahlverwandtschaft the elective affinity of souls almost with the rapture of a Platonist, conceiving love as the soul finding its pre-natal half.
His mother hated Jim before he was born. It was his pre-natal heritage, combined with a selfish nature. There was misrepresentation and deception enough to make a plot for a novel; a misunderstanding and brief estrangement, separating Jim and Alice forever all managed by Tank and his mother, for the farm first, and the downfall of Jim second.
Benumbed by countless centuries of superstition and passive surrender to false education, to social influences, to pre-natal conditions, to the terrors of law and custom, and to the lurid threats and horrors of the imaginary drama of eternity, the mass of mankind have lost the power of the dispassionate philosophical reasoning demanded by loyalty to truth, and they do not know how to appreciate it when they see it.
Then, as the publisher turned away to replace the P. Ts. in a safe, he added softly: "Intelligence is never likely to be so widely diffused in Ante-land that the masses would fight shy of birth. There would always be a sufficient proportion of unborn fools left who would prefer the palpabilities of bodily form to the insubstantialities of pre-natal existence.
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