Professor Copes Table 53 



individual's personal relation to his social environment. 

 The main point involved, however, may be briefly .sug- 

 gested here, although, for the details of the influences 

 now indicated, the other book may be again referred to 

 (chapters on ' Suggestion ' and ' Emotion '). 1 



The writer there traces in some detail what other writ- 

 ers also have lately set in evidence, i.e., that in the child's 

 personal development, his ontogenesis, his life history, he 

 works out a faithful reproduction of his social conditions. 

 He is, from childhood up, excessively receptive to social 

 suggestion ; his entire learning is a process of conforming 

 to social patterns. The essential to this, in his heredity, 

 is very great plasticity, cerebral balance and equilibrium, 

 a readiness to overflow into the new channels which his 

 social environment dictates. He has to learn everything 

 for himself, and in order to do this he must begin in a 

 state of great plasticity and mobility. Now, my point, 

 put briefly, is that these social lessons which he learns 

 for himself take the place largely of the heredity of par- 

 ticular paternal acquisitions. The father must have been 

 plastic to learn, and this plasticity is, so far as the evi- 

 dence goes, the nervous condition of consciousness ; thus 

 the father learned, through his consciousness, from his 

 social environment. The child does the same. What he 

 inherits is the nervous plasticity and the consciousness. 

 He learns particular acts for himself; and what he learns 

 is, in its main lines, what his father learned. So he is 

 just as well off, the child of Darwinism, as if he were 

 physical heir to the acquisitions which his father made. 

 This process has been called ' Social Heredity,' seeing 

 that the child really comes into possession of the details; 



1 Also the later work, Social and Ethical Interpretations. 



