46 THE CONTROL OF LIFE 



tivity or exercise, without food, or without the stimulus 

 of appropriate surroundings, but the way in which the 

 creature uses the influences that play upon it, the way 

 in which it girds up its loins to work or lets itself go 

 in play, is in fart determined by what it owes to 

 parents and ancestors. In part, not wholly ; and that 

 for two reasons : first, because peculiarities in the 

 circumstances count for something in themselves, being 

 often provocative to effort and often deadening in their 

 dullness ; and second, because each new creature, while 

 owing everything to the past, has in some measure an 

 individuality of its own and thus an element of 

 unpredictability. 



Here we touch one of the most difficult of intel- 

 lectual problems, the harmonising of facts which point 

 to determinism with facts which point to individual 

 freedom of action, but all that we need notice at 

 present is that a child is often very obviously a dis- 

 tinctive personality that cannot be accounted for in 

 any rough-and-ready way as the necessary resultant of 

 component factors observable in its parents. It is a 

 familiar fact (not difficult to explain) that brothers are 

 often very dissimilar in nature. It is also well known 

 nowadays that a pair of grey mice, the offspring of a 

 grey father and a white mother, will have in one litter 

 both grey and white progeny. But there is a broader 

 fact — the likelihood that the young life will be in some 

 measure a new pattern, a fresh unification, an individ- 

 uality. Variability is a big fact of life. Moreover, it is 

 of fundamental importance in human life to understand 



