HUMAN AND ANIMAL EVOLUTION CONTRASTED 41 



eration learn from the last. Hence it will concern 

 all those characteristics that go to make up society 

 in its widest sense. This will clearly enough include 

 language, customs, government, knowledge, and the 

 accumulating works of mankind which have been 

 age after age changing the face of nature. In respect 

 to these no question will be raised. We may hesi- 

 tate whether to regard the tendency to form socie- 

 ties as itself a matter of social or organic inherit- 

 ance. We may hesitate still more in determining 

 whether the moral sense of man, his conscience, is a 

 matter of social inheritance, or whether this may not 

 be inborn and hence one of the characteristics trans- 

 mitted by geraiinal inheritance. If we should con- 

 clude after study that the moral sense is a matter of 

 social rather than organic inheritance, we should 

 then be faced with the even more significant question 

 whether there is any distinctive human attribute that 

 comes in any way except through social inheritance. 

 We should perhaps be forced to the conclusion that 

 it is only what we sometimes call the lower side of 

 our nature that is given us by organic inheritance, 

 while all that is more ennobling, all that is most dis- 

 tinctively human, comes to us through social hered- 

 ity. We should be even forced to ask whether, after 

 all, the chief difference between man and animals is 

 not in the fact that man alone has acquired the power 

 of utilizing this force of social inheritance, and 

 whether what we speak of as humanity may not be 

 thought of as simply an accumulation of the expe- 

 riences of the ages which man has learned to hand 

 on to his progeny by a method entirely new. If this 

 should be true, it will follow that mankind has by this 

 means cut himself off from the action of the laws of 



