378 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



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 po- 

 tent factor of my total being the living, speaking organ- 

 ism which now addresses you? As stated at the begin- 

 ning 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, mak- 

 ing us good or bad, noble or mean, as the age pleases. 

 The age can stunt, promote, or pervert pre-existent ca- 

 pacities, but it cannot create them. The worthy Eobert 

 Owen, who saw in external circumstances the great mold- 

 ers of human character, was obliged to supplement his 

 doctrine by making the man himself one of the circum- 

 stances. It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts be- 

 cause 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 insan- 

 ity, the best guidance the judge and jury can have is de- 

 rived from the parental antecedents of the accused. If 

 among these insanity be exhibited in any marked degree, 

 the presumption in the prisoner's favor is enormously en- 

 hanced, because the experience of life has taught both 

 judge and jury that insanity is frequently transmitted from 

 parent to child. 



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

 ernor of one of our largest prisons. He was evidently an 



