THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT, 315 



does certainly bring up a biological line of thought, and the 

 analogy from evolution doctrine is materially helpful ; so we need 

 not be afraid of it. 



Generally, then, who is eligible for the social inheritance ? 

 This heir to society we are, all of us. Society does not make a 

 will, it is true ; nor does society die intestate. To say that it is 

 we who inherit the riches of the social past of the race, is to say 

 that we are the children of the past in a sense which comes upon 

 us with all the force that bears in upon the natural heir when he 

 finds his name in will or law. But there are exceptions. And 

 before we seek the marks of the legitimacy of our claim to be the 

 heirs of the hundred years of accumulated thought and action, 

 let us say, of this American continent, it may be well to advise 

 ourselves as to the poor creatures who do not enter into the in- 

 heritance with us. They are those who people our asylums, our 

 reformatories, our jails and penitentiaries ; those who prey upon 

 the body of our social life by demands for charitable support, or 

 for the more radical treatment by isolation in institutions : indeed, 

 some who are born to fail in this inheritance are with us no more, 

 even though they were of our generation ; they have paid the 

 penalty which their effort to wrest the inheritance from us has 

 cost, and the grave of the murderer, the burglar, the suicide, the 

 red-handed rebel against the law of social inheritance, is now 

 their resting place. Society then is, when taken in the widest 

 sense, made up of two classes of people the heirs by right and 

 the rebels by birth. 



We may get a clear idea of the way a man attains his social 

 heritage by dropping figure for the present and speaking in the 

 terms of plain natural science. Ever since Darwin propounded 

 the law of "natural selection" the word "variation" has been 

 current. The student in natural science has come to look for 

 variations as the necessary preliminary to any new step of prog- 

 ress and adaptation in the sphere of organic life. Nature, we 

 now know, is fruitful to an extraordinary degree. She pro- 

 uces many specimens of everything. It is a general fact of 

 production that the offspring of plant or animal is quite out 

 proportion in numbers to the parents that produce them, and 

 o to the means of living which await them. One flower pro- 

 ces seeds which are carried far and near to the ocean and 

 the desert rocks, no less than to the soil in which they may 

 ke root and grow. Insects multiply at a rate which is simply 

 inconceivable to our limited capacity for thinking in figures. 

 Animals also produce more abundantly, and man has children in 

 numbers which allow him to bury half his offspring yearly and 

 yet increase the adult population from year to year. This means, 

 course, that whatever the inheritance is, all can not inherit it 



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