on the educational quality of the
environment, and even then inherited tendencies may be so strong as to
make them a source of danger to the community rather than of benefit.

It is noted, for example, that a deal of what may be called crime, or at
least lawlessness, is the result of an individual being born with
tendencies developed in a way that fits him for an environment of
centuries ago, rather than an environment of to-day. Very many of our
national heroes of a few centuries ago would rank as criminals to-day,
just as many of our criminals to-day would, had they been born a few
centuries since, have been handed down to us as examples of chivalry or
of national heroism. Instead of what one may call the natural endowments
of man pointing towards a more civilised form of life, they point to a
less civilised form, while it is the artificially or socially induced
feelings and ideas that point to a better future.

Thus, if we take the primitive or brute feeling of retaliation we find
it assuming the form of war. And without discussing the value of war in
the past, or even its admissibility in special circumstances in the
present, I do not think it will be seriously disputed that the great
need of the present is to transfer that feeling from the lower level of
brute force to the higher one of adventure in the interests of science
and human betterment. Here it is not the existence of a lofty
"god-given" endowment that puts man out of harmony with his environment;
it is, on the contrary, the operation of an earlier form of feeling
manifestation which retards the coming of a better day.

There is, in fact, not a single quality of human nature that can be
said to act with inerrancy. The baby seizes objects indiscriminately and
puts them in its mouth. The man falling into the water does the very
thing he should not do--throws up his arms. Intense cold lulls to
somnolency, instead of rousing to activity. The love of children, on
which the preservation of the race depends, is absent with many; while
with others the sexual instinct undergoes strange and morbid
manifestations. A complete list of these disharmonies would fill a
volume--indeed, Metchnikoff, in his "Nature of Man," has filled half a
volume with describing some of the instances of physiological
disharmony, and then has not exhausted the list.

It would indeed seem as if nature, with its method of never creating a
new organ or structure, but only transforming and u