e
influence of climate. It follows that if you change education and social
institutions you can change the character of men.

The error of Helvetius in ignoring the irremovable physical differences
between individuals, the varieties of cerebral organisation, was at once
pointed out by Diderot. This error, however, was not essential to the
general theory of the immeasurable power of social institutions over
human character, and other thinkers did not fall into it. All alike,
indeed, were blind to the factor of heredity. But the theory in its
collective application contains a truth which nineteenth century
critics, biassed by their studies in heredity, have been prone to
overlook. The social inheritance of ideas and emotions to which
the individual is submitted from infancy is more important than the
tendencies physically transmitted from parent to child. The power
of education and government in moulding the members of a society
has recently been illustrated on a large scale in the psychological
transformation of the German people in the life of a generation.

It followed from the theory expounded by Helvetius that there is no
impassable barrier between the advanced and the stationary or retrograde
races of the earth. [Footnote: The most informing discussion of the
relations between the Advanced and Backward races is Bryce's Romanes
Lecture (1902).] "True morality," Baron d'Holbach wrote, "should be
the same for all the inhabitants of the globe. The savage man and
the civilised; the white man, the red man, the black man; Indian and
European, Chinaman and Frenchman, Negro and Lapp have the same nature.
The differences between them are only modifications of the common nature
produced by climate, government, education, opinions, and the various
causes which operate on them. Men differ only in the ideas they form
of happiness and the means which they have imagined to obtain it." Here
again the eighteenth century theorists held a view which can no longer
be dismissed as absurd. Some are coming round to the opinion that
enormous differences in capacity which seem fundamental are a result of
the differences in social inheritance, and that these again are due to
a long sequence of historical circumstances; and consequently that there
is no people in the world doomed by nature to perpetual inferiority
or irrevocably disqualified by race from playing a useful part in the
future of civilisation.

4.

This doctrine of the possib