io8 FUNCTIONAL INERTIA 



without any gross charge being incurred by man- 

 kind." This is now being widely recognised ; the 

 thief by instinct, that is, by heredity, the man who 

 inherits the unstable brain and the tendency to 

 insanity of mind, the youth who is the victim of 

 hereditary alcoholism these are being pitied, helped, 

 studied, anything but blamed at the present moment. 

 There appears to be no form of mental aberration, 

 of emotional abnormality, that may not be inherited 

 (Ribot) : * what seems, in any given individual 

 to be so spontaneous, may really be parentally 

 derived or even be an atavism to a remote past. 

 Thus the educationist and the moral teacher stand 

 aghast before psychic inertia and ask if modern 

 science, the physiology and psychology of to-day, 

 can merely groan in the hopelessness of an enlight- 

 ened fatalism. Such is happily not its position ; 

 the hereditary criminal or drunkard is not, of 

 course, absolutely destitute of psychic affectability, 

 although in these days it is his psychic inertia 

 which, under other names, has been more particu- 

 larly recognised and studied. But, indeed, such 

 cases are hopeless enough ; the imbecile, the weak 

 in intellect, the hereditarily depraved ! with these 

 education has the impossible task of being asked 

 to make bricks out of the granite masses of functional 

 inertia with only or.e or two straws of affectability 

 thrown in. Still, all cases are not absolutely hope- 

 less, though the psychologically trained teacher 



* Ribot, <( Heredity," p. 86. (London : H. S. King and Co., 

 I875-) 



