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Updated: May 6, 2025
Man also has his appropriate and peculiar work: not merely living for that he has in common with vegetables; nor the life of sensible perception for that he has in common with other animals, horses, oxen, &c. There remains the life of man as a rational being: that is, as a being possessing reason along with other mental elements, which last are controllable or modifiable by reason.
How could natural selection, or any other process of selection, work upon species to modify them, if there were not something in species pushing out and on, seeking new ways, new forms, in fact some active principle that is modifiable? Life has risen by stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things. Why has it risen?
By that very fact these features betray themselves as less fundamental to the genius of the language than the more slowly modifiable features in which the dialects keep together long after they have grown to be mutually alien forms of speech. But this is not all.
For the phenomena in question may be of an eminently modifiable character; insomuch that innumerable circumstances are capable of influencing the effect, although they may all do it according to a very small number of laws.
"Algy was right," say I, soliloquizing aloud, as I stand before the long cheval glass, with a back-hair glass in one hand, by whose aid I correct my errors in the profile, three-quarters or back view; "mine is not the most hopeless kind of ugliness. It is certainly modifiable by dress."
But while he rejected pure necessitarianism in its crude form as essentially a REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of life, he was fully conscious of the fact that the will is not a mysterious and ultimate unit of force beyond which we cannot go and whose special characteristic is inconsistency, but a certain creative attitude of the mind which is, from the first, continually influenced by habits, education and circumstance; so absolutely modifiable, in a word, that the good and the bad man alike seem to lose the power of free will; for the one is morally unable to sin, the other physically incapacitated for reformation.
But both the one and the other deal with contingent matters only. We are told what are the matters wherewith it is, and wherewith it is not, conversant. It does not deal with matters wherein there exist art, or with rules of art. It does not deal with necessary matters, nor with matters not modifiable by human agency.
The fact that the laws which prevail in it are modifiable and modified makes no difference; they modify themselves, and in their different forms still constrain us. And no matter how increasingly beneficent they may in their action appear, they are still despotic and we unfree. The rule of laws which Science discovers encroaches upon our liberties and privacies.
Lazy and impertinent clerks, stuck-up shop assistants, inconsiderate employers, brutal employees, unendurable servants, and no less unendurable mistresses what place will be left for them as civilisation advances? We have assumed, in the past, that these things and the likes of these are modifiable by nurture, and that where they cannot be cured they must be endured.
Such a supposition would be inconsistent with the eminently modifiable nature of the social phenomena, and the multitude and variety of the circumstances by which they are modified—circumstances never the same, or even nearly the same, in two different societies, or in two different periods of the same society.
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