iled on
offspring? Perhaps it is just as well, for we are novices at nurturing
even yet! Moreover, the non-transmissibility cuts both ways: if
individual modificational gains are not handed on, neither are the
losses.

Is the "nature"--the germinal constitution, to wit--all that passes from
generation to generation, the capital sum without the results of
individual usury; then we are freed, at least, from undue pessimism at
the thought of the many harmful functions and environments that
disfigure our civilization. Many detrimental acquired characters are to
be seen all around us, but if they are not transmissible, they need not
last.

In the development of "character," much depends upon early nurture,
education, and surrounding influences generally, but how the individual
reacts to these must largely depend on his inheritance. Truly the
individual himself makes his own character, but he does so by his
habitual adjustment of his (hereditarily determined) constitution to
surrounding influences. Nurture supplies the stimulus for the expression
of the moral inheritance, and how far the inheritance can express itself
is limited by the nurture-stimuli available just as surely as the result
of nurture is conditioned by the hereditarily determined nature on which
it operates. It may be urged that character, being a product of habitual
modes of feeling, thinking, and acting, cannot be spoken of as
_inherited_, but bodily character is also a product dependent upon vital
experience. It seems to us as idle to deny that some children are "born
good" or "born bad," as it is to deny that some children are born strong
and others weak, some energetic and others "tired" or "old." It may be
difficult to tell how far the apparently hereditary goodness or badness
of disposition is due to the nutritive influences of the mother, both
before and after birth, and we must leave it to the reader's experience
and observation to decide whether we are right or wrong in our opinion
that quite apart from maternal nutritive influence there is a genuine
inheritance of kindly disposition, strong sympathy, good humor, and good
will. The further difficulty that the really organic character may be
half-concealed by nurture-effects, or inhibited by the external heritage
of custom and tradition, seems less serious, for the selfishness of an
acquired altruism is as familiar as honor among thieves.

It is entirely useless to boggle over the difficulty that w