INERTIA AS RELATED TO CONSCIOUSNESS 109 



knows well the inexorable limits set by psychic 

 inertia. Limits all psychologists recognise ; Ribot 

 writes* of the organism's " limited capacity for 

 pleasure and pain ; " intellectual limits are as 

 notorious : wise is that man who early recognises 

 his own. 



Thus such a recent writer on " Education and 

 Heredity" as J. M. Guyau, is fully alive to the 

 mental inertial factor as the great difficulty of educa- 

 tionists. He assigns to a moral characteristic, good 

 or bad, five generations through which to persist 

 before it is eliminated, f but a few thousand years 

 ago the Bible set the limit at the third or fourth. 



Monsieur Guyau is very explicit as regards in- 

 herited disabilities and limits : " many philosophers 

 and men of science now believe that education is 

 radically powerless when it has to modify to any 

 great extent the radical temperament and character 

 of the individual ; according to them a criminal as 

 well as the poet, nascitur non fit the child's whole 

 moral destiny is contained in it while yet unborn, 

 and in later life this destiny develops itself relent- 

 lessly. " Had I seen this passage when first putting 

 together my views on heredity and consciousness 

 as related to functional inertia, it would have 

 confirmed me very strongly, for I could scarcely 

 have had them better expressed. From my point 

 of view, however, they are incomplete only because 

 the relation of this fatality of preadjustment is 



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

 1875.) f Ibid. Preface, p. 23, 



