82 HEREDITY AND CHRISTIAN PROBLEMS 



a strong will and noble instincts, each choice 

 will place him higher in the scale of manhood. 

 This statement has the force of a demonstration : 

 choices are always more or less influenced by 

 heredity. Dr. Maudsley says again : " Crime is 

 not in all cases a simple affair of yielding to an 

 evil impulse or a vicious passion which might 

 be checked were ordinary control exercised ; it 

 is clearly sometimes the result of an actual 

 neurosis which has close relations of nature 

 and descent to other neuroses ; and this neurosis 

 is the physical result of physiological laws of 

 production and evolution. Why should we think 

 of man as possessed of a fixed moral and will 

 power any more than of a fixed intellectual 

 power } " The force of this reasoning is all but 

 irresistible. 



II. It is only when we turn away from these 

 facts which, when the approach is made from 

 the side of physical science, seem the nearest 

 and most imperative, that we realize that there 

 is another realm whose phenomena are some- 

 what less distinct, perhaps, but no less certain 

 and commanding, — phenomena which modify con- 

 clusions that would otherwise be inevitable. 



Some choices are clearly independent of, and 

 even in opposition to, both what is known of the 



