274 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



stimuli were inherited, in psychic Evolution, on the other 

 hand, a general plasticity of reaction was inherited, an 

 indefinite range of acquiring experience, a vast capacity of 

 learning in the individual life how to react to any particular 

 stimulus which might happen to come along. The animal, 

 therefore, appears with its very limited range of faculties 

 ready made, so to say, and in its individual life learns very 

 little beyond this definite endowment for specific activities. 

 The human person, on the contrary, has in addition to its 

 organic animal inheritance a psychic inheritance which 

 endows it with the capacity for educability, with a capacity 

 for acquiring new experience and learning new ways of 

 acting and reacting, which raises it infinitely above the 

 merely animal phase. The free, creative, holistic activity of 

 mind appears conspicuously in its hereditary transmission, 

 so that our human inheritance does not fetter us, but by 

 its very nature confers plasticity, freedom and creativeness 

 upon us. What we inherit is not a ready-made affair but 

 a wide possibility and potency of moulding ourselves in 

 our lives. In other words, what above all is inherited is 

 freedom, and the capacity of free and self-determined 

 action and development in our individual lives. In our 

 psychic nature we are thus raised above the bondage of 

 organic inheritance. 



Now what does this imply? Surely this, that there is 

 something more in us over and above this inherited endow- 

 ment. The freedom must belong to an agent; the plasticity 

 implies a creative moulder. I inherit various capacities, 

 but my own Personality itself is not inherited, but is uniquely 

 and originally mine. I inherit a definite animal body, 

 slightly different from those of my parents and ancestors; 

 I likewise inherit a mental structure, somewhat resembling 

 theirs, but much less so than my body resembles theirs. 

 But over and above this organic and psychic inheritance 

 there is an individuality, an individual personality, which 

 makes of this double inheritance a uniquely different blend 

 and composition. The flavour of each human person is 

 uniquely and absolutely individual. However similar the 



