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Updated: May 8, 2025
If functionally-produced modifications are inheritable, then the mental associations habitually produced in individuals by experiences of the relations between actions and their consequences, pleasurable or painful, may, in the successions of individuals, generate innate tendencies to like or dislike such actions.
Be this or be it not a warrantable conclusion, there is, I think, good reason for a provisional acceptance of the hypothesis that the effects of use and disuse are inheritable; and for a methodic pursuit of inquiries with the view of either establishing it or disproving it.
But tastes are inheritable. Monty Paliser came in for a few, but not for the four-in-hand. Less vigorous than his father, though perhaps more subtle, he preferred the tandem. In preparation for one that he had in view, he looked in, not at a mart, but at a shrine. It was on the afternoon succeeding Cassy's visit to his slippery floor.
Moreover, only one of them is actually inheritable, and that one is transmitted relatively seldom. But among psychic characters one finds that practically all are inheritable.
Feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, some forms of insanity, and some venereal diseases are inheritable defects; those who suffer from them must refrain from having children. Studies of the "Jukes" family and the "Kallikak" family, and others, show convincingly the spread of these defects where defectives marry. See R. L. Dugdale, The Jukes.
If the changes of structure produced by such changes of function, are inheritable, then the re-adjustment of parts throughout the organism, taking place generation after generation, maintains an approximate balance; but if not, then generation after generation the organism must get more and more out of gear, and tend to become unworkable.
Darwin that "when one part is modified through continued selection," "other parts of the organization will be unavoidably modified" is perfectly intelligible: these entailed secondary modifications are transmitted pari passu with the successive modifications produced by selection. But what if they are not inheritable?
The fact that the weaker go to the wall does not bring about the greater strength of the stronger; it is the consequence of this last and not the cause unless, indeed, it be contended that a knowledge that the weak go to the wall stimulates the strong to exertions which they would not otherwise so make, and that these exertions produce inheritable modifications.
There is proof enough that insanity admits of being induced by circumstances which, in one or other way, derange the nervous functions excesses of this or that kind; and no one questions the accepted belief that insanity is inheritable.
It became a matter of doubt whether the heir per capita or the heir per stirpes was to succeed; but whether the heir per capita gave way when the heirdom per stirpes took place, or the Catholic heir when the Protestant was preferred, the inheritable principle survived with a sort of immortality through all transmigrations, Multosque per annos Stat fortuna domûs, et avi numerantur avorum.
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