Moral Consequences of Heredity. 357 



This brings us back to our subject, which we seemed to have 

 forgotten. If it be admitted that the moral act comprises a great 

 number of ideas, judgments and sentiments, as has been already 

 shown by the influence of heredity on the development of sensi- 

 bility and intelligence, then heredity must also exert a great 

 influence on the formation of habits and of moral ideas moral 

 heredity is only a form of psychical heredity. It will suffice, then, 

 to show briefly how heredity has contributed to insure the moral 

 conditions of the evolution of society. 



It is generally admitted that primitive societies must have passed 

 through three phases hunting, pastoral, and agricultural. It is 

 only with the latter that civilization begins. 



In the hunter stage, which is the condition of all existing savages, 

 communities live by the chase, by fishing, and by war. This phase 

 is characterized by the unlimited development of warlike instincts, 

 bloodthirsty appetites, and a wandering, reckless life. Savages, 

 like children, are prone to follow their sensual and turbulent pas- 

 sions. Communities that have been unable to rise out of this 

 state, have either perished or drag out a miserable existence until 

 some superior race shall exterminate them. Such as have been 

 able to submit to the yoke of rude laws, imposed upon them by 

 their sages, have in time acquired less brutal manners and less 

 furious appetites. It is very likely that in this case heredity has 

 acted by accumulation. The earlier generations submitted only 

 with great repugnance to laws which galled them sorely, by 

 restraining their most natural tendencies. Yet they in this way 

 acquired somewhat gentler habits, and these habits, transmitted 

 by heredity, made succeeding generations more ready to obey the 

 law. And thus, amid many exceptions and frequent reversions to 

 primitive appetites (phenomena of atavism), new steps in advance 

 were ever possible, and savage instincts continually diminished. 



The same is to be said of nomad peoples : for instance, the Tartars 

 and the Mongols. Their manners are less fierce, and their habits 

 more sociable than those of the hunter tribes, but yet their taste 

 for an adventurous life detains them in a low form of civilization. 

 Civilization must be attached to the soil; it requires a sedentary 

 life, cities, roads, individual property in short, those fixed elements 

 which are its conditions of existence. The Turks and the Mant 



