THE INFLUENCES OF NURTURE 117 



not buried in obscurity, and a degree of unsoundness 

 which can escape the attention of parental eyes quick- 

 ened by love, the experience of the family physician, 

 and the everyday tests of work and play, is not likely 

 to be so very unsound. Apart from marriage certi- 

 ficates, which will probably come, what is common- 

 sense for ? What has been wrong in the past has often 

 been that obvious unsoundness was winked at. 



(3) Deteriorative nurture sometimes makes people 

 look worse than they are ; and there is an unfortunate 

 risk of confusing dints due to the blows and buffetings 

 of outrageous fortune with outcrops from within. The 

 social consequences of giving a dog a bad name are 

 familiar, and it is to be feared, for instance, that there 

 are more criminals made than there are born. As it 

 is said in the Gospels : it is what cometh from within 

 that defiles a man. 



§5. The Other Side of Heredity 

 The past lives on in the present, that is what is 

 meant by heredity. There is an inexorableness in the 

 transmission, or one should rather say, the persistence, 

 of all sorts of inborn or constitutional characteristics. 

 Sometimes it is a trivial feature like a shock of white 

 hair ; sometimes it is a deadly vice of blood ; some- 

 times it is all bodily, leaving the spirit unblemished, 

 as in many cripples ; sometimes it is a blot on the brain 

 that affects the character now in this way and again 

 in that, but always perniciously. There is no gainsapng 

 the fatalistic impression, and since heredity is just a 



