ral heredity being only a sequel, and revealing in its
elementary stage the same indifference to real justice, and the same
blindness. Whatever the moral cause of the ancestor's drunkenness or
debauch, the same punishment may be meted out in mind and body to the
descendants of the drunkard or the debauchee. Intellectual blemish
will almost always accompany material blemish. The soul will be
attacked simultaneously with the body; and it matters but little
whether the victim be imbecile, mad, epileptic, possessed of criminal
instincts, or only vaguely threatened with slight mental derangement:
the most frightful moral penalty that a supreme justice could invent
has followed actions which, as a rule, cause less harm and are less
perverse than hundreds of other offences that Nature never dreams of
punishing. And this penalty, moreover, is inflicted blindly, not the
slightest heed being paid to the motives underlying the actions,
motives that may have been excusable perhaps, or indifferent, or
possibly even admirable.

It would be absurd, however, to imagine that drunkenness and debauchery
are the only agents in moral heredity. There are a thousand others,
all more or less unknown. Certain moral qualities appear to be
transmitted as readily as though they were physical. In one race, for
instance, we will almost constantly discover certain virtues which have
probably been acquired. But who shall say how much is due to heredity,
and how much to environment and example? The problem becomes so
complicated, the facts so contradictory, that it is impossible, amidst
the mass of innumerable causes, to follow the track of one particular
cause to the end. Let it suffice to say that in the only clear,
striking, definitive cases where an intentional justice could have
revealed itself in physical or moral heredity, no trace of justice is
found. And if we do not find it in these, we are surely far less
likely to find it in others.

6

We may affirm therefore that not above us, or around us, or beneath us,
neither in this life nor in our other life which is that of our
children, is the least trace to be found of an intentional justice.
But, in the course of adapting ourselves to the laws of life, we have
naturally been led to credit with our own moral ideas those principles
of causality that we encounter most frequently; and we have in this
fashion created a very plausible semblance of effective justice, which
rewards or p