28 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



and means of selection continued much the same for 

 at least a century and a half. And our experience 

 of religious persecution has done little to prejudice 

 us in favour of a scientific " suppression." Even 

 if science were as infallible in its judgment of the 

 best type as the Church has sometimes claimed to 

 be, the methods which would have to be adopted 

 would jar strangely with our nineteenth-century 

 ideas of toleration and freedom. 



The other difficulty may, perhaps, be due to 

 prejudice. But it is not easy in a moment to 

 recast traditional ideas of justice and adopt a 

 theory of punishment in which suffering would be 

 meted out to those who are the unfortunate, but 

 helpless, vehicles of that over the possession and 

 transmission of which they have no control. We 

 do not shrink from punishing the fathers for the 

 children, but it is only a primitive society which 

 recognizes it as just that if the fathers have eaten 

 sour grapes the children's teeth should be set on 

 edge. If with all the modern opportunities of 

 education a child grows up in ignorance, the 

 School Board rightly punishes the parent. But 

 the more rigorously we apply Weismann's theory 

 of Heredity the farther back we are driven in our 

 search for a punishable subject. We are driven 

 back step by step to the primitive variations 

 among the protozoa, where ordinary methods of 

 punishment are not available. The fact that these 



