12 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



born," for we could then believe that the education 

 of the parents actually affected the characters which 

 they transmitted to their offspring. But with the 

 new knowledge of heredity such a belief is no longer 

 possible, since education is nothing but a series of 

 acquired characters and hence not transmitted by 

 inheritance. The education of the parents has no 

 effect upon the inherited traits of the children. If, 

 then, neither environment nor training can affect 

 inheritance there seems to be left as a means of 

 improving the coming generations no method except 

 improving the inheritance by guiding in some way 

 the mating of individuals, so that only those with the 

 better lines of inheritance shall be allowed to prop- 

 agate the race. This feeling has brought to the 

 front the modern interest in eugenics which tries to 

 improve the race by some kind of control of the mat- 

 ings of mankind which shall breed a race of men 

 as perfect as our breeders have produced in their 

 I high-bred horses. 



Eugenics. — The teaching of eugenics leads to two 

 unfortunate results. The first is a feeling of hope- 

 lessness and pessimism. As long as it was possible 

 to believe that the inheritance which we transmit 

 to our offspring might be modified by our own ac- 

 tions, it was possible to see a hope in the future. If 

 the race can be permanently modified by the training 

 that may be given to individuals, progress is inevit- 

 able. But if we are forced to believe that by nothing 

 that we do can we influence the inheritance which we 

 hand down to our children, we are landed almost in 

 despair. By this new view of heredity we learn that 

 the inheritance which we are to transmit into our off- 

 spring is fixed when we select our husband or wife. 



