248 TRANSMISSION OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERS 



stimuli available just as surely as the result of nurture is con- 

 ditioned by the hereditarily-determined nature on which it 

 operates. It may be urged that character, being a product of 

 habitual modes of feeling, thinking, and acting, cannot be spoken 

 of as inherited, but bodily character is also a product dependent 

 upon vital experience. It seems to us as idle to deny that some 

 children are " born good " or " born bad," as it is to deny that 

 some children are born strong and others weak, some energetic 

 and others " tired " or " old." It may be difficult to tell how 

 far the apparently hereditary goodness or badness of disposition 

 is due to the nutritive influences of the mother, both before and 

 after birth, and we must leave it to the reader's experience and 

 observation to decide whether we are right or wrong in our 

 opinion that quite apart from maternal nutritive influence there 

 is a genuine inheritance of kindly dispositions, strong sympathy, 

 good-humour, and good-will. The further difficulty that the 

 really organic character may be half-concealed by nurture- 

 effects, or inhibited by the external heritage of custom and 

 tradition, seems less serious, for the selfishness of an acquired 

 altruism is as familiar as honour among thieves. 



It is entirely useless to boggle over the difficulty that we are 

 unable to conceive how dispositions for good or ill lie implicit 

 within the protoplasmic unit in which the individual life begins. 

 The fact is undoubted that the initiatives of moral character are 

 in some degree transmissible, though from the nature of the case 

 the influences of education, example, environment, and the like 

 are here more potent than in regard to structural features. We 

 cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, though the plasticity 

 of character under nurture is a fact which gives us all hope. 

 Explain it we cannot, but the transmission of the raw material 

 of character is a fact, and we must still say with Sir Thomas 

 Browne : " Bless not thyself that thou wert born in Athens ; 

 but, among thy multiplied acknowledgments, lift up one hand 

 to heaven that thou wert born of honest parents, that modesty. 



