354 NATURE AND LIFE. 



transformation. Nations, like individuals, have their times 

 of greatness and of decay. Looking on the face of Nature 

 in Greece, Childe Harold exclaims : 



" Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild ; 

 Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields ; 

 Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled, 

 And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields ; 

 There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds, 

 The free-born wanderer of thy mountain air ; 

 Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds, 

 Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare ; 

 Art, glory, freedom fail, but Nature still is fair." 



We might multiply endlessly these historic contrasts 

 between the unchangeableness of that general determinism 

 that rules in Nature and the ceaseless movement of human 

 freedom and inventiveness, the eternal struggle of the soul 

 to wrench itself from the grip of fatality. History is mere- 

 ly the story of what that movement and struggle have 

 brought forth in the ages. It is a lengthened drama, 

 through which the good genius of freedom strives for vic- 

 tory with the evil genius of brute force, in which, under 

 the divine eye and with divine aid, through lingering and 

 suffering, triumph is won for the spirit which seeks, dis- 

 covers, invents, creates, loves, and worships. 



III. 



In the first part of this essay, we proved the existence 

 of the facts of heredity, and pointed out the part they take 

 in the indefinite reproduction of physiological and psycho- 

 logical characteristics in man. In the second, we noted 

 and examined the causes that work in opposition to the 

 more or less imperious impulses of Nature and to the re- 

 straints of mechanical structure. It is well now to state 

 some practical conclusions as to the use that may be made 

 of these kinds of knowledge for the improvement of the race. 



