158 THE CHILD AND HEREDITY 



the other hand, the ways of Dualism and Agnosticism are 

 easy. It is easy to make the realms of nature and of 

 spirit into closed and exclusive systems, or into different 

 orders of being, so that natural law terminates, and spiritual 

 law begins at a certain point. And it is easy to postulate 

 some incognizable unity behind nature and spirit, and to 

 conceal their difference by making them aspects of it, or 

 to bring in some unknowable reconciliation of them in an 

 Absolute which surpasses knowledge. It is easier still to 

 seek to establish man in an unexpugnable ignorance of all 

 true being ; to maintain that his science never penetrates 

 behind appearances to the real, and is full of unverified 

 hypotheses, which can be riddled by metaphysics ; and to 

 hold that morality and religion have even less rational 

 cogency than his knowledge, unless we are permitted to 

 base them upon the dogmatism of authority, or intuition, 

 or faith. But the primrose path in philosophy leads, like 

 others, to undesirable results. 



All these methods have been attempted by the different 

 philosophical schools of the day. But none of them has 

 proved satisfactory or brought rest. Why should they? 

 They merely offer as a solution a re-statement of the 

 problem. The natural pre-determination of the child, 

 whether through heredity, or through the power over him 

 of external circumstance, remains to threaten his spiritual 

 nature ; and his spiritual nature remains to contradict the 

 merely natural character of the medium within which it 

 operates. Nor does it matter on which of these two the 

 accent is thrown ; the ideas of the fixity of inherited char- 

 acter in the child and of its being plastic to environment 

 are both alike fatal to a free and rational life. The possi- 

 bility of moral character, which must be of the individual's 



