156 THE CHILD AND HEREDITY 



in the last resort to another order of being than these 

 latter. 



But the problem of man's rational and moral life cannot 

 be solved in this way, nor the meaning of heredity and 

 environment as applied to mankind be made plain. For 

 the question is not a question of the degree in which the 

 natural, inherited, or external elements enter into his life ; 

 but of the manner in which they enter. It matters nothing 

 where we draw the line that distinguishes the self from the 

 not-self, or the man from that which is before or outside 

 of him : we may draw it between the transcendental self 

 and the empirical self; between the self as knowing and 

 the self as object of knowledge ; between the self as 

 noumenon and the self as phenomenon ; between the self 

 and the character ; between the self and the feelings, 

 thoughts, and volitions which are the content of character ; 

 or between the self and the physical conditions which ante- 

 cede or environ it. The result is still the same. The 

 self that we thus isolate is empty and impotent ; and the 

 man as a whole, whose nature is, after all, the object of 

 discussion, is represented as a compound of extraneous and 

 mutually repellent elements, which is in theory unintelli- 

 gible, and in practice powerless for either good or evil. 

 The natural and the spiritual, or the formal self and its 

 extraneous content, cannot at the same time co-operate and 

 retain their mutually exclusive characteristics. 



It is for these reasons that the problem of heredity 

 assumes in the realm of Psychology and Ethics a different 

 character from that which it has in that of Biology. Biology 

 could at best give only the "natural" history of man, and 

 either his "natural" history is not his whole, or even his true 

 history, or else his morality and religion are nothing but 



