logy which should cast aside
the old and threadbare raiment of mystery and speculation and
metaphysic, and stand forth naked and unashamed.

But all this was only preparatory to the epoch-making discoveries that
have had so much to do with our present attitude toward education. The
Darwinian hypothesis led to violent controversy, not only between the
opponents and supporters of the theory, but also among the various camps
of the evolutionists themselves. Among these controversies was that
which concerned itself with the inheritance of acquired characteristics,
and the outcome of that conflict has a direct significance to present
educational theory. The principle, now almost conclusively
established,[5] that the characteristics acquired by an organism during
its lifetime are not transmitted by physical heredity to its offspring,
must certainly stand as the basic principle of education; for everything
that we identify as human as contrasted with that which is brutal must
look to education for its preservation and support. It has been stated
by competent authorities that, during the past ten thousand years, there
has been no significant change in man's physical constitution. This
simply means that Nature finished her work as far as man is concerned
far beyond the remotest period that human history records; that, for all
that we can say to-day, there must have existed in the very distant past
human beings who were just as well adapted by nature to the lives that
we are leading as we are to-day adapted; that what they lacked and what
we possess is simply a mass of traditions, of habits, of ideals, and
prejudices which have been slowly accumulated through the ages and which
are passed on from generation to generation by imitation and instruction
and training and discipline; and that the child of to-day, left to his
own devices and operated upon in no way by the products of
civilization, would develop into a savage undistinguishable in all
significant qualities from other savages.

The possibilities that follow from such a conception are almost
overwhelming even at first glance, and yet the theory is borne out by
adequate experiments. The transformation of the Japanese people through
two generations of education in Western civilization is a complete
upsetting of the old theory that as far as race is concerned, there is
anything significantly important in blood, and confirms the view that
all that is racially significant depen