296 THE PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY 



acquisition of mental traits foreign to its own system. It 

 covers or tinges with its influence practically the whole field 

 of human knowledge, thought, and endeavour. In inculcates 

 peculiar beliefs concerning the universe around, sets up a 

 peculiar standard of right and wrong and of morals and 

 conduct, indicates peculiar means, and sanctifies peculiar 

 ends. Even the instincts come within its purview. The 

 instincts for food, rest, and sleep have been the occasions of 

 many curious tapus. Many religions tend to restrain the 

 sportive instinct. In Scotland, for instance, it is considered 

 sinful for children to develop their minds and bodies on 

 Sunday. Almost without exception religions have restrained 

 the instinct of curiosity, hence the prolonged intellectual 

 and social stagnation in which so many races have sunk. 

 All religions have used the imitative instinct, on which all 

 man's civilization and all his barbarism are dependent, as 

 a means of insuring their own continuance ; hence their 

 endeavours to direct the education of children. The sexual 

 instinct, especially, has been under their control. A few 

 religions have encouraged it ; many have in part encouraged 

 and in part restrained it ; a few have held it in abhorrence; 1 



1 To " cut down by the axe of Virginity the wood of Marriage " was 

 an ideal amongst the early Christians. Even the parental instinct was 

 held by them in no great esteem ; some saints were highly lauded for 

 deserting their children as were others for deserting their aged parents. 

 The suppression of almost every instinct, the destruction of human 

 happiness and well-being on earth, and ultimately the extinction of the 

 human race appears, in effect, to have been the principal aim of our 

 ancestors in religion. Nothing, in fact, shows more clearly the greatness 

 of the part played by acquirement in the human mind than the amazing 

 and seemingly fundamental differences in mental traits between the 

 clear-headed denizens of the Roman Republic and their near descendants, 

 the early Christians ; unless indeed it be the mental differences between 

 an age that revered Saint Simeon Stylites, of whom an admiring 

 biographer recorded that "a horrible stench, intolerable to the bystanders, 

 exuded from his body, and worms dropped from him whenever he 

 moved, and they filled his bed," or Saint Antony who was never guilty 

 of washing his feet, or Saint Euphrasia who joined a community of 

 one hundred and thirty nuns all of whom shuddered at the thought of 

 a bath, or that austere virgin Silvia who at sixty years of age, though 

 suffering from a sickness caused by her habits, refused on religious 

 principles to bathe any part of her body except her fingers, and an 

 age that reveres Galileo, Newton, and Darwin, believes on the whole 

 that cleanliness is next to godliness, and treats religious mania in a 

 mad-house. The decline of Greece and Rome has been attributed by 

 those writers who are inclined to believe almost every human character- 

 istic is inborn to an inrush of mentally inferior aliens. It would 

 almost seem as if they thought that the Greeks and Romans had left 

 no descendants. But even if it be admitted that the classic races were 

 swamped, the mystery is, if anything, deepened. If their peculiar 



