496 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE: 



who is captain of his soul, need not submit to the lien that 

 ancestry has over him. Brave words, of course; but history 

 is full of brave deeds. One does not wish to say much about 

 the way in which — by a survival of Nature's regime in the 

 Kingdom of Man — rotten stocks come of themselves to an 

 end ; for the tragedy is that they often taint sound stocks 

 by the way. 



(2) Moreover, it is ungrateful to forget that the hereditary 

 relation, which depresses us when we lose perspective, secures 

 the entailment of all manner of wholesome human qualities. 

 The true inwardness of heredity is a holding fast of that 

 which is good. 



(3) For characters that blend, if the occurrence of blend- 

 ing characters be granted, it may remain true what Galton 

 stated in his Law of Filial Regression, — that there is a reg- 

 ular regression or deviation which brings the offspring of 

 extraordinary parents in a definite ratio nearer the average 

 of the stock. This succession-.tax is even-handed; the off- 

 spring of under-average parents come nearer the mean just 

 as do those of extraordinarily gifted parents. 



(4) The hereditary relation is such that it admits of 

 variability, for the temptation to make a quite misleading 

 antithesis between heredity and variation should be avoided. 

 There is a strong specific inertia — the first law of motion, 

 as it were; but there is a copious fountain of change — the 

 second law, as it were. Phrase it as we may, there is some- 

 thing like creativeness, which is always supplying the new 

 .raw material of progress. Unless we have quite misunder- 

 stood evolution, it implies an emergence of novelties. It is 

 like original thinking. 



(5) The quality of the nurture, largely in our own hands, 

 determines the degree to which the buds of good qualities in 



