Moral Consequences of Heredity. 335 



Thus the missionary societies sometimes adopt Chinese infants 

 and have them educated in European institutions at great expense : 

 they go back to their own country with the resolve to propagate 

 the Christian religion, but scarcely have they disembarked when 

 the spirit of their race seizes upon them, they forget their promises, 

 and lose all their Christian beliefs. It might be supposed that 

 they had never left China. 1 



To sum up, the consequences of heredity have been found to 

 be twofold. Now it builds for the future, making possible, by the 

 accumulation of simple sentiments, the production of sentiments 

 more complex. Again it goes back towards the past, setting up 

 again forms of sensitive activity once natural, now in disaccord 

 with their environment. For there exist in the bottom of 

 the soul, buried in the depths of our being, savage instincts, 

 nomadic tastes, unconquered and sanguinary appetites which 

 slumber but die not. They resemble those rudimentary organs 

 which have outlived their functions, but which still remain as 

 witnesses to the slow, progressive evolution of the forms of life. 

 And these savage instincts, developed in man during the past, 

 whilst he lived free amid the forests and streams, are from time 

 to time recalled by heredity, by some trick which we do not under- 

 stand, as though to let us measure with the eye the length of 

 road over which we have travelled. 



CHAPTER III. 



MORAL CONSEQUENCES OF HEREDITY. 

 I. 



AT the first step in every study of morals we meet the inextri- 

 cable problem of free-will. We are the less able to avoid it here, 

 since it touches our subject at more than one point. We have 

 already often directed attention to the fatalistic character of heredi- 

 tary transmission, and the reader must see that what we give to 

 heredity we take from free-will, and that heredity offers an abundant 



1 A. Reville, Revue des Deux Mondes, i Sept bre - 1869. 



