MAN'S SPECIAL EDUCATION 101 



and characteristics of his special family and stock is 

 the enormous mass of accumulated experience, know- 

 ledge, tradition, custom, and law which pervades and 

 envelops, as it were, the mere physical generations 

 of this or that pullulating crowd of human individuals. 

 Tradition, at first conveyed by gesture and imitativeness 

 from parents to offspring, then by word of mouth, then 

 by writing, and finally by printed record, sanctioned 

 and enforced by all kinds of persuasion and compulsion 

 has culminated in an educative discipline which 

 affects every individual in the community in the most 

 powerful way and constitutes an inheritance of a 

 significance and activity altogether transcending, and 

 independent of that due to the physical transmission 

 of bodily and mental qualities. Public opinion, law, 

 knowledge, belief, custom, and habit exist, and pursue 

 their own course of change, as it were, outside the 

 successive bodily generations of a population. Yet 

 they determine in very large measure the characteristics 

 which each class, and the community as a whole, 

 exhibit. We have to distinguish those results which 

 are due to physical heredity, similar in man and in 

 animals from results due to this all-powerful education 

 peculiar to man education, which for civilised man 

 proceeds from almost innumerable sources from 

 parents, nurses, playfellows, companions, social, pro- 

 fessional, and political organisations, as well as from 

 the professed teacher, and from the local peculiarities 

 of the simplest conditions of life. Hence it is that 

 man inherits very little in the way of ready-made 

 instincts, tricks of his nervous mechanism but, on the 

 contrary, has an enormously long period of individual 

 growth and education, and inherits "' educability " 

 to a degree which varies in every family and race. 



To estimate correctly, and so to deal with these 

 various factors in human life, we require to know in 

 detail the laws of breeding, heredity, variation, and 



