LAWS CONTROLLING HUMAN SOCIAL HEREDITY 323 



answered with equal ease. Even thougk civilization 

 is a series of acquired characters, these have accu- 

 mulated age after age because of the new force of 

 social heredity resulting from the social life of man. 

 Each generation teaches the next consciously and un- 

 consciously; each generation benefits by the discov- 

 eries of the last. Age after age men living in social 

 communities accumulate the discoveries, inventions, 

 customs, and modes of thinking, as well as the gener- 

 alizations of previous ages. These artificial products 

 can accumulate just as surely as can organic char- 

 acters; and they accumulate much more rapidly, 

 since each generation can materially add to that 

 which it received from the last and can then hand on 

 the accumulated inheritance. The progress is far 

 more rapid than the slow one of the accumulation of 

 organic characters. By example or discovery a 

 single generation may add immensely to the total 

 sum of social inheritance; as, for example, when 

 printing or the telephone was given to contribute 

 its influence ujaon civilization. In organic evolution 

 a single generation contributes little, and not at all 

 unless valuable variations happen to appear in the 

 germ plasm. Advance is therefore slow. But since 

 any individual in the human race may add greatly to 

 the content of social heredity, the advance of social 

 evolution may be very rapid. Thus the laws of 

 social heredity explain both how the mental achieve- 

 ments of human beings develop with civilization, and 

 also how civilization has developed with the growth 

 of mental powers, in spite of, or, rather, because of, 

 tlie fact that civilization is only a series of acquired 

 characters not transmitted to posterity by the ordi- 

 nary laws of inheritance. 



