DOES HEREDITY OR ENVIRONMENT MAKE MEN? 497 



As Professor Thorndike has pointed out, when it comes to the 

 absolute achievements of men, the outward performance to which they 

 can attain, environment is well-nigh all powerful. But when it comes 

 to determining which individuals in that civilization will profit the 

 most by it and contribute the most richly to its expansion and con- 

 tinuance, the all-important thing is each individual's heredity. A 

 man gives to his environment and receives from it just in proportion 

 to the richness of his own nature. Was any great environment ever 

 built by a race of fools? No. Was any truly small and mean environ- 

 ment ever built by a race teeming with genius? No. Where there is 

 no vision, no genius, the people perish. 



As another example, I walked down the street a while ago upon a 

 pavement which took all the combined physics, chemistry, social, 

 political and economic organization of a great industrial age to con- 

 struct. I had nothing to do with it. It was a part of my environment. 

 But I was able to walk faster and reach my journey's end earlier — that 

 is, make a greater absolute achievement — because of it. By my side 

 walked a laboring man with a basket of groceries for his family. Now, 

 it may be that this man has a son in college who will some day write a 

 much better book on heredity and eugenics than this one. But it cer- 

 tainly would surprise me to find that all the students in colleges and 

 all writers of books were laboring men's sons, and all the sons of the 

 abler and more successful classes should to-morrow be handling the 

 picks and shovels of our civilization. 



The whole point of this is that the things which men can do depend 

 upon the tools that are at hand in the forms of environment, ma- 

 chinery, social organization, ideals and systems of education — in short, 

 what we call the social heritage. But the relative performances of 

 one man as compared with another, that is, what each man does with 

 these tools — this social heritage, depends almost entirely upon his in- 

 dividual, inborn heritage. Consequently, it is the duty of all men to 

 improve the general social heritage because this furnishes multiplied 

 opportunities for each man to develop and express his personal 

 heritage. 



Let us see if, in a rough way, we can not measure this. The other 

 day I motored through the western part of the state of New York, 

 where I had learned the lives and histories of the farmers in consider- 

 able detail. I was being driven by a man who knew them all inti- 

 mately. We passed a farm which a few years ago had been one of the 

 model farms of western New York. At the death of the owner, whom 



