INERTIA AS RELATED TO HEREDITY 79 



This was an almost instantaneous unfolding of 

 functional propensities certainly not in virtue of 

 training or of education, or of the environment, 

 but in virtue of a preadjusted capacity it was 

 due to functional inertia. 



Throughout Dr. Mercier' s work the stability and 

 instability of the nervous system are contrasted. 

 The stable nervous systems are those with much 

 anabolic inertia and little affectability, in the un- 

 stable these are reversed. Dr. Mercier after alluding 

 to what the environment can effect on a plastic 

 (affectable) nervous system says,* (f the fact remains 

 that for the great majority of people the question of 

 the stability or instability of their highest nervous 

 arrangements resolves itself into a question of the 

 kind and degree of organisation that they have in- 

 herited from their ancestry." We have seen that 

 the property underlying the mechanism of inherit- 

 ance is the inertial one it maintains the status quo, 

 stable if stable, unstable if unstable. We have seen 

 how Dr. Mercier employs the notion of -^nomentum, 

 he finds it indispensable " an organism by its 

 possession of what for want of a better term 7 

 must call\ momentum." J I would only add tha 

 there is no better term, for the good reason that 

 it is a term related to a property in protoplasm 

 katabolic inertia which we must reckon with in 

 our analysis of organic existences whether normal 

 (sane) or abnormal (insane). 



* " Sanity and Insanity/' p. 143. f The italics are mine. 



| " Sanity and Insanity," p. 182. 



