! 2 VARIATION 



The term " character " is employed in this text to designate one 

 of those details of form or function which, taken together, consti- 

 tute a well-marked group of animals or plants more or less closely 

 related by descent, and this is the only sense in which the term 

 ought to be used. Thus the color characters of the horse are 

 black, bay, brown, gray, etc., but not red, green, or blue, although 

 these characters are not unknown to the animal world, being 

 common with birds. 



Used in this sense, a "character" belongs primarily to the 

 race or group of which the individual is a member. It is there- 

 fore not peculiar to any particular individual and is in no sense 

 personal property. Thus not only the color of the coat but the 

 form of the body, the peculiar function of any of its organs, as in 

 milk production or the secretion of poisons, any special mental 

 attitude or intellectual function, or even a particular crook of 

 limb or special body marking of any kind that runs commonly 

 through the groups, is properly spoken of as a racial character. 

 Those characters do not come and go, but on the contrary they 

 remain with the race indefinitely. The individual horse, for 

 example, will be marked by one or possibly more of the color 

 characters of his kind, black, white, bay, etc., but he will 

 not be marked with characters not of his kind, as red, green, 

 etc. From this we see that the individual is not so good a 

 unit for study as is the group to which he belongs and the racial 

 characters that compose it. 



Now the personality of the individual so strongly impresses 

 us that we instinctively regard him as an actual unit, and we 

 speak loosely of his characters as if they were personal property 

 peculiar to this individual alone, whereas he possesses nothing 

 that is not common to his race. His differences are in degree, 

 not in kind. 



What we mean to designate in the individual is the particular 

 combination of racial characters that make up his personality, 

 knowing perfectly well that the characters of all individuals within 

 the race are racial characters and no other, and that every indi- 

 vidual that may ever arise by descent will be limited as to his 

 details to some combination of the characters of his race. Now 

 the characters of any race are so many, their deviations are so 



