THE CHILD AND HEREDITY 177 



The question of surrounding the child with influences 

 calculated to evolve its powers is thus of transcendent 

 importance. From birth to death he acquires nothing 

 except from his surroundings. Apart from the com- 

 munity, from his community, from the atmosphere of 

 example and general custom which he apprehends and 

 assimilates, he is but a blank possibility and an abstraction. 

 liis very self is social in its whole make and structure. 

 His character, if it is necessarily all of his own making 

 and the expression of his own inner rational life, is never- 

 theless wrought out of the active substance of the social 

 habitudes that surround him ; "its content implies in every 

 fibre relations of community." The tongue he speaks is 

 not more surely the language of his own people than are the 

 ideas he forms, the sentiments he imbibes, and the habits 

 he makes. Hence it follows that the best, nay, the only 

 good education of the child, comes, as Pythagoras said, 

 1 ' by making him the citizen of a people with good institu- 

 tions." What the limits of the inborn potentialities of a 

 child may be no one can determine. There is a sense in 

 which it is not possible to think too highly of his heritage. 

 For is not reason in its very nature the counterpart of the 

 realm of reality? And is not the world of things and 

 men, the marvellous outer cosmos and the still more 

 marvellous order of social life in all their inexhaustible 

 variety of contact, there for him to assimilate and possess ? 

 But this inheritance, ideally so great, is in actual practice 

 limited to the forces that immediately play around him. 

 And, within the limited scope of his life on earth he cannot 

 excel, except to a most exiguous degree, the actual life in 

 which his lot is cast. He can jrise but a little above his 

 smToundings. The educative power of a community 



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