VI PREFACE. 



on acceptance or rejection of the doctrine that not only 

 in the individual, but in the successions of individuals, 

 use and disuse of parts produce respectively increase and 

 decrease of them. 

 *-&quot;&quot; Of course there are involved the conceptions we form 



of the genesis and nature of our higher emotions ; 

 and, by implication, the conceptions we form of our 

 moral intuitions. If functionally-produced modifications 

 are inheritable, then the mental associations habitually 

 produced in individuals by experiences of the relations 

 between actions and their consequences, pleasurable or 

 painful, may, in the successions of individuals, generate 

 innate tendencies to like or dislike such actions. But if 

 not, the genesis of such tendencies is, as we shall see, not 



\ ..satisfactorily explicable. 



That our sociological beliefs must also be profoundly 

 affected by the conclusions we draw on this point, is 

 obvious. If a nation is modified en masse by transmission 

 of the effects produced on the natures of its members 

 by those modes of daily activity which its institutions 

 and circumstances involve ; then we must infer that 

 such institutions and circumstances mould its members 

 far more rapidly and comprehensively than they can do if 

 the sole cause of adaptation to them is the more frequent 

 survival of individuals who happen to have varied in 

 favourable ways. 



I will add only that, considering the width and depth 

 of the effects which acceptance of one or other of these 

 hypotheses must have on our views of Life, Mind, Morals, 

 and Politics, the question Which of them is true ? demands, 

 beyond all other questions whatever, the attention of 

 scientific men. 



Brighton, January, 1887. 



