286 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



emphatic enough to tell us quite certainly that if a 

 child could be brought uj) isolated from all other 

 human society^ he would be found when adult to be 

 lacking in the distinctive attributes of man ; at least 

 without any of the characters that constitute the 

 social individual. He would be what is sometimes 

 spoken of as a ''wild man" — just a little distance 

 removed from the brute. Intellectually and morally 

 he would be devoid of the very characters that dis- 

 tinguish social man. 



From these considerations it is evident that social 

 evolution is something unique. Instincts are indeed 

 only the outward expression of nervous structure 

 and nervous adjustment. The communal customs of 

 the bumblebee are represented in the egg from which 

 the individual hatches. The problem of the evolution 

 of instincts is thus, in its last analysis, a problem of 

 structure, like the other phases of evolution that biol- 

 ogists have studied, and is dependent upon organic 

 inheritance. But the human civilization is not pres- 

 ent in the human ovum, nor is it present in the nerv- 

 ous system of the neivly horn infant. It would never 

 develop in a single individual if he were left alone. 

 It is something that is forced upon him by the mold- 

 ing action that comes from the conditions in the 

 midst of which his mind develops. It has always 

 been and still is something entirely external to his 

 organic nature. Civilization is not a part of man's 

 body, nor yet of his brain. It is an artificial product 

 which he has created and which he hands on to his 

 offspring by other means than organic heredity. 



Organic and Artificial Characters in Man 

 Herein lies a fundamental error in some of the 



