DOES HEREDITY OR ENVIRONMENT MAKE MEN? 553 



But the thing to reflect upon is that every child who is not posi- 

 tively idiotic has within him those glorious powers by which he can 

 seek out the inspiring man who will preach to him the inspiring sermon ; 

 he has the power to seek out the good book and read it; he has the 

 power to choose his companions, his teachers, the way he spends his 

 time and money, and in the long run build his own sm-roundings. 



Obviously, however, even here environment plays a very strong 

 hand; for the more choices that are opened before a child, the more it is 

 encouraged to make this choice instead of that, the more surely will it 

 be enabled in the end to form those right habits of choosing the good 

 instead of the bad, and also have those right objects and courses before 

 it to choose which lead to self-mastery and success. And self-mastery 

 is merely success in the utilization of one's heredity. For success itself 

 by and by becomes a habit, ingrained in the very motor patterns of 

 the nerve system itself. Every child should be guarded against, and 

 should guard itself against the habit of failure. As James says, you 

 may forget the fine resolution you made and failed to carry out, but 

 the nerve cells do not forget. Down in the very depths of our bodily 

 organization, each tiny nerve cell is registering every act and thought, 

 and laying it up in store for some future occasion, either for or against 

 you. "Make your nervous system," he says, "your ally instead of 

 your enemy." This contains almost the whole basis of moral educa- 

 tion. And one should always remember with old Spinoza, the German 

 philosopher, that "if you can keep from doing a thing because it is 

 bad, you can keep from doing the same thing because something else 

 is good." This is the whole difference between living the positive and 

 the negative life. One can not build a successful and happy life unless 

 he has filled his mind and tuned his nerves to be up and alive with the 

 things he must do, instead of always holding them back with the checks, 

 inhibitions and prohibitions of the things he must not do. The theo- 

 logical hell which is pictured for lost souls in the future, says James, 

 can be no worse than the hell which many of us build for ourselves in 

 this world by continually fashioning our nervous systems — our wills — 

 in the wrong way. And, granted that there is in us a power of choos- 

 ing at all, granted that thinking has any purpose in it, then the oppor- 

 tunity to build daily more stately mansions for our souls in this world 

 at least, is every morning opened anew to us all. 



Thus, notwithstanding our belief, and I think our demonstration, 

 that a man's inborn nature is the chief cause of his being different from 

 other men, the cause of his making different choices, building a differ- 

 ent "personality picture" of himself and his life, from the personality 



