258 THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 



jects of the monarch are having more and more 

 rights. The people of England are surely as free 

 as are the people of the United States. Increasingly \ 

 all forms of government will secure for all their sub- 

 jects, no matter what their station in life, a fair share 

 of the general prosperity. In this field, human evo- 

 lution is perhaps more rapid than in any other. 



Any individual human being is a network of traits 

 and peculiarities. He has all the ordinary attributes 

 of humanity, but to the whole complex he gives an 

 individual peculiarity which is totally his own. 

 Where did he get his cjualities? In the earlier times 

 the fairies were supposed to have blessed him or 

 cursed him in his cradle. A later age saw in the 

 stars the rulers of man's destiny. He was jovial, or 

 saturnine, or martial, depending on the planet which 

 was in the ascendant at the time of his birth. Now 

 we know "it is not in our stars but in ourselves that 

 we are underlings." Everything a man is comes to 

 him from within or from without; from nature or 

 from nurture ; from his heredity or from his en- 

 vironment. From our ancestors we get all the pos- 

 sibilities of our lives. To a certain extent we are 

 slaves to our heredity, but not by any means to any 

 such extent as to make us hopeless, unless oiu* hered- 

 ity is miserably bad. To the great mass of us come 

 larger potentialities than we ever develop, and such 



