362 FKAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



action ? Adequate reflection will, I think, prove that 

 we are not. What, for example, have I had to do with 

 the generation and development of that which some will 

 consider my total being, and others a most potent factor 

 of my total being the living, speaking organism which 

 now addresses you ? As stated at the beginning of this 

 discourse, my physical and intellectual textures were 

 woven for me, not by me. Processes in the conduct or 

 regulation of which I had no share have made me what 

 I am. Here, surely, if anywhere, we are as clay in the 

 hands of the potter. It is the greatest of delusions to 

 suppose that we come into this world as sheets of white 

 paper on which the age can write anything it likes, 

 making us good or bad, noble or mean, as the age 

 pleases. The age can stunt, promote, or pervert pre- 

 existent capacities, but it cannot create them. The 

 worthy Eobert Owen, who saw in external circumstances 

 the great moulders of human character, was oblige^, to 

 supplement his doctrine by making the man himself 

 one of the circumstances. It is as fatal as it is 

 cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our 

 taste. How many disorders, ghostly and bodily, are 

 transmitted to us by inheritance ? In our courts of 

 law, whenever it is a question whether a crime has 

 been committed under the influence of insanity, the 

 best guidance the judge and jury can have is derived 

 from the parental antecedents of the accused. If 

 among these insanity be exhibited in any marked 

 degree, the presumption in the prisoner's favour is 

 enormously enhanced, because the experience of life 

 has taught both judge and jury that insanity is fre- 

 quently transmitted from parent to child. 



I met, some years ago, in a railway carriage the 

 governor of one of our largest prisons. He was evi- 

 dently an observant and reflective man, possessed of 



