LAWS CONTROLLING HUMAN SOCIAL HEREDITY 325 



this inevitably follows from fixing our attention too 

 strongly upon the recognized laws of organic inherit- 

 ance. Among animals, individuals certainly are not 

 responsible either for their own inheritance or that 

 of their offspring. 



But when we realize that human social evolution 

 has not been an organic one, and that it has been 

 due not to congenital but to acquired characters, 

 not to organic but to social heredity, the sense of 

 responsibility for our lives comes back to us with 

 greater force than ever. It is exactly these acquired 

 characters that are forming the future. It is the 

 lives that men live that create social inheritance. 

 It is not a matter of indifference to our children or 

 to posterity in general what kind of a life we indi- 

 vidually live. We are responsible for the social her- 

 itage that we give our children, even if we are not 

 responsible for their organic heritage. We may 

 greatly modify the social inheritance of our off- 

 spring, even after they are born, though we may not 

 modify their organic inheritance; and in determin- 

 ing what they will become and what they will do in 

 the world, the social inheritance commonly counts 

 much more than the organic inheritance. It has 

 made a great difference to the heritage of the world 

 that a Luther, a Washington, or a Lincoln lived the 

 life he did, for with men the life counts, quite inde- 

 pendently of organic inheritance. The heritage of 

 the race is determined more by what men do than by 

 what they inherit from their parents by organic 

 inheritance. For all of these reasons, personal re- 

 sponsibility, that seems to be vanishing when we fix 

 our attention closely upon the laws of heredity and 

 the discussions of eugenics, comes back to us more 



