124 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



human powers of abstraction of ideas from concrete 

 incidents. From being forced to obey lie forms an 

 idea of some superhuman influence, demanding his 

 obedience, and this creates his idea of right and 

 wrong. In this way, the idea of morality is an arti- 

 ficial creation, handed on by social inheritance. If a 

 child were brought up apart from other human be- 

 ings, where he was responsible for no one and no 

 one responsible for him, we can hardly believe 

 that he would spontaneously develop conscience, 

 and probably no sense whatsoever of right and 

 wrong. If this be true, the moral sense, though 



' based upon true innate characters, is essentially 

 acquired anew by each generation from the teach- 

 ing of the last, and thus is the result of social rather 



^ than organic inheritance. This conclusion we may 

 accept without denying that different individuals 

 inherit by organic inheritance these fundamental 

 instincts which alone make conscience a possibility, 

 and that they inherit them in different degrees in 

 different families. 



It is not necessary for us to try to decide whether 

 this attempt to explain the development of the 

 moral sense by natural methods will be substanti- 

 ated by the study of future years. Beyond ques- 

 tion there are many points concerning it which need 

 further light, and while it seems a natural method 

 of explaining the origin of this fundamental human 

 attribute, a final conclusion concerning it may be 

 well left for the future to decide. One thing, how- 

 ever, is certain: the human race now possesses an 

 ethical nature, one which has been undergoing a 

 slow but constant development during the period of 

 human history, a nature which calls upon mankind 



