VIRILE SENTIMENT 57 



exists, and so long as it is operative in guiding and 

 initiating social legislation, it constitutes a source of 

 the gravest danger to the nation. It is time we awoke. 

 It is time we turned our attention to Biology, and 

 refused to heed any longer the " rope-dancers in the 

 market places." 



Let us pass now from the question of environment 

 to consider inherent qualities and the way in which, 

 once they have come into existence, be they good or 

 bad, they irrevocably pass on unaltered through 

 successive generations. An organism does not mani- 

 fest a single quality alone, but is made up of a complex 

 combination of many qualities. Some of these 

 qualities, be they structural or psychical, are them- 

 selves not simple, but complex. Some of them are 

 independent of others in the hereditary transmission, 

 but others are correlated and always go together, 

 in larger or smaller groups, from generation to genera- 

 tion. An individual, like his environment, is really 

 an aggregate of complexities bound up within each 

 other. This fact renders all questions of social 

 interest extremely difficult to consider, and is the 

 best justification of the laisser-faire attitude. If 

 we depart from the certain ground of Nature, and 

 artificially touch one link in the series of com- 

 plexities that are interlinked and make up the 

 tangled chain of life, it is not possible to forecast 

 even the immediate, much less the remote con- 

 sequences. They are always such as we never 

 expected them to be. Nevertheless, certain main 

 trends of this chain are sufficiently clear for practical 



