340 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



birth of each individual, then we shall have to invent a new term for 

 what is ordinarily understood to be progressive or continuous evolu- 

 tion. The assumed peculiar property of the germ plasm is its con- 

 tinuity from one generation to another, and its capability of receiving 

 with each new generation the impress resulting from a change in the 

 environment, or tendency to such change. Were this not so, then the 

 offspring would be simply a repetition of the parents, instead of being 

 like them with a difference, and there would be neither any fixed 

 variation nor any individuality in organisms. Take the subject of 

 human education. Does it wholly depend on the permanence of the 

 intellectual enviroment, or is there an inherited capacity or aptitude 

 for learning which runs in families or strains, and which is the result 

 of the education of one or several generations, whether the training be 

 for business, for the learned professions, or even for criminal pursuits ? 

 Unless we are much mistaken, all human progress in learning, or in 

 the arts and sciences, is based on the conception that in the long run 

 mankind will increase in mental intelligence and capacity for learning. 

 The history of science shows that a new department of learning may 

 arise and each succeeding generation work more easily on the founda- 

 tion laid by the previous generation. The work does not have to be 

 begun de novo, but some degree of capacity for the new cult is inher- 

 ited by successive generations ; certainly the intellectual environment 

 may be said to change with each generation. 



All progress in humanity appears to be due, not only, in the first 

 place, to our maintaining the present intellectual environment, with 

 the manifold and many-sided stimuli of our present social structure, 

 but also to the unceasing efforts of the leaders in advanced thought 

 in many different departments of mental training and effort to open 

 up new fields of research in natural, physical, and mental science, and 

 their applications, to gain new and higher points of view in sociology 

 and morals as well as in statecraft, and in short to perfect and hasten 

 the development of the ideal man. Unless this progress, which is an 

 historic fact, has been due not only at the outset, but all through 

 human history thus far, to this principle of the inheritance of mental 

 traits, causing the intellectual efforts of one generation to pass down 

 and thus to have finally a cumulative effect, how could there be any 

 progress in human society ? * 



* Herbert Spencer states in his Principles of Biology: "Certain powers 

 which mankind have gained in the course of civilization cannot, I think, he 

 accounted for, without admitting the inheritance of acquired modifications." 

 Vol. I. p. 249. 



