302 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



less during tlie years that have followed the appear- 

 ance of the new conceptions of heredity which started 

 with Weismann. 



But the principle of social heredity which we have 

 been studying does not claim to do what the older 

 biologists attributed to the environment. This prin- 

 ciple recognizes that there are in all animals certain 

 characters which are incorporated into their organic 

 nature, are represented in the germ plasm, and are 

 handed on by the laws of germinal heredity. But it 

 also insists that there are other characters possessed 

 by animals which are developed during the life of 

 the animal as the result of the actions of its environ- 

 ment upon it. These do not, it is true, become incor- 

 porated into its nature in such a manner as to be 

 part of the germinal substance in condition for trans- 

 mission by organic heredity. But the conception of 

 social heredity as we have been considering it pre- 

 sents two phases in which it is vastly more compre- 

 hensive and far-reaching than the older phrase ' ' the 

 environment." First, it points out that so far as 

 concerns mankind these artificial characters, acquired 

 anew by each generation, constitute the larger parts 

 of the attributes which make him the social unit; 

 while the characters which he receives by organic 

 heredity simply make him a human animal with a 

 few important instincts. The larger portion of the 

 attributes of the twentieth-century man he receives 

 from his environment and does not inherit by organic 

 inheritance at all. This phase of the matter places 

 this force of social heredity far ahead of the older 

 ideas associated with the term ''environment." 



A se-cond new phase of social heredity is the recog- 

 nition of the fact that the acquired characters devel- 



