ia. But of any progressive improvement there is no evidence whatever.
Those children who had a natural aptitude for the work would, of course,
form the successors of their parents, and there is no proof of anything
hereditary except as regards this innate aptitude. Many people are
alarmed at the statement that the effects of education and training are
not hereditary, and think that if that were really the case there would
be no hope for improvement of the race; but close consideration will
show them that if the results of our education in the widest sense, in
the home, in the shop, in the nation, and in the world at large, had
really been hereditary, even in the slightest degree, then indeed there
would be little hope for humanity, and there is no clearer proof of this
than the fact that we have not _all_ been made much worse--the wonder
being that any fragment of morality, or humanity, or the love of truth
or justice for their own sakes still exists among us."[15]

I think the majority of thoughtful people will agree that these words
express their own observations. Every day we see how children have to be
taught to act and behave. We see continually how parents have to put
pressure on their children to make them accept and apply those moral
principles and mental valuations which have guided their lives and the
lives of thousands of generations before them. We know only too well
that children do not inherit the moral standards of right and wrong of
their parents, and that to establish these principles in the young is a
matter of protracted and often painful inculcation. The proved maxim
that honesty is the best policy is still being literally hammered into
the children of to-day who seem to find it no easier to follow the
better way than did the children of the past. If mental modifications
acquired by the parents were in any degree transmissible to the
offspring then there would be no need for this constant repetition of
the same process in every new generation.

The earliest indubitable man hitherto discovered was fully evolved when
first met with, he was _homo sapiens_. By means of his human
intelligence this frail, unspecialized being became in a sense the very
lord of creation, for instead of remaining, like the animals, entirely
subject to his surroundings he subjected his surroundings to himself. By
means of this intelligence man was enabled to break away from the
absolute rule of the law of natural selection whi