APPENDICES 1467 



must fulfil certain minimcLl requirements of food, fresh air, space, 

 beauty, change, and so forth. Generous environment helps to make 

 the most of a man; deficient environment may depress, inhibit, 

 starve, and kill. To an extent unsuspected before Biology came 

 of age, Man is modifiable by his Environment and stimulated by 

 his Environment for better or for worse. Yet man, when he finds 

 and uses his opportunities, is increasingly master of his environ- 

 mental Fate. 



Thirdly, the biological view of man sees him as a developing 

 organism, which means more than the imiversal recognition of his 

 infancy, childhood, adolescence, and so forth — a recognition 

 obviously older than any biology, though aided by it. It means that 

 every human organism realises a complex inheritance in a complex 

 environment, and that every character is a resultant of two compo- 

 nents — the hereditary nature and the environing nurture. It means 

 that the degree of development, whether all-round or lop-sided, 

 varies with the nurture, whether generous or niggardly. Moreover, 

 the shape of the life-curve — the individual trajectory— is both 

 variable and modifiable ; thus childhood may be short and strained, 

 or long and joyous; adolescence may be the successful adventure 

 of an argosy, or a miserable shipwreck; and ageing may be, as 

 Shakespeare said, a ripening or a rotting. The nurtural factor in 

 development has potencies far from being fully estimated; and 

 these affecting mind as well as body, through and through. In 

 Whitman's unforgettable lines: "There was a child went forth every 

 day, and what that child saw became part of him — for a day, or 

 for a year, or for stretching cycles of years." No doubt the study 

 of heredity confirms something of the old fatalism ; yet it has to be 

 corrected by a fuller biology which does some justice to the modi- 

 fying power of nurture, and to the continual emergence of the new. 



Fourthly, the biological outlook on human life implies a recog- 

 nition of man as the long result of time, solidary with the rest of 

 creation. His fabric is shot through and through with partially 

 humanised threads from his mammalian ancestry. The past reasserts 

 itself in his present, often inconveniently. Yet he is the outcome of 

 a progressive evolution. It is an ascent, not a descent, that he has 

 behind him. His ilesh is heir to many ills, but there is an organic 

 momentum within him that is stronger for integration than for the 

 opposite. Moreover, his evolution is going on; the fountain of the 

 new is unexhausted. The Darwinian factors, of variability and 

 heredity, selection and isolation, continue to operate — changing 

 and entailing, sifting and singling. The world is new every day, for 

 better or for worse ; but the trend towards betterment is normally 

 the stronger. 



Moreover, while man is biologically a scion of a mammalian stock, 

 it is scientifically sound to recognise his apartness. For he is a 



