late's platform, which admits that a
law entails a lawgiver, but declares that of the Lawgiver of Natural
Laws we can know nothing.[12]

There is a further point in connection with Mendelian theories which is
worth noting in this connection. It would appear that no new factor is
ever brought into being, that is, no _addition_ is ever made by
variation. According to this theory the things which appear to be
added--a new colour or a new scent--were there all the time. They were
"stopped down" or inhibited by some other factor, which, when
eliminated, allows them to come into play, and thus to become obvious to
the observer from whom they had been hidden. Thus, Professor Bateson
(M., p. 17) has confidence "that the artistic gifts of mankind will
prove to be due, not to something added to the make-up of an ordinary
man, but to the absence of factors which in the normal person inhibit
the development of these gifts. They are almost beyond doubt to be
looked upon as _releases_ of powers normally suppressed. The instrument
is there, but it is 'stopped down.'"

That all sorts of things may exist in a very small compass no doubt
is true. Professor Bateson reminds us that Shakespeare was once
"a speck of protoplasm not so big as a small pin's head." The
difficulty--insuperable on ordinary monistic lines--is how all these
things got into the germ if no additions ever take place. It was so
difficult to account, for example, for artistic appreciation on the part
of man or for gifts of an artistic character that Huxley was fain to
describe them as gratuitous; but on this showing all characters are
gratuitous in the sense that they are not acquired. We may reasonably
inquire not merely how all these characters and factors got themselves
"arranged" or "packed," but where they came from, and how they came to
be in the germ at all, matters on which we receive no information in
these addresses. No doubt the author of the addresses would say that it
was no part of his business to explain this matter; that he took this
system of Nature as a going system and did his best to explain it as
such and without attempting, perhaps even without desiring, to explain
how it got a-going. If that be the case, and if ignorance on this head
must be his confession, it is a little difficult to understand the
confidence with which he sets himself to discuss the "extraordinary and
far-reaching changes in public opinion [which] are coming to pass." We
shall