360 TRANSMISSION 



functional range and are quite out of control of the individual ; 

 others, like the brain and the hand, are capable of functioning 

 in many directions, so many that no lifetime is long enough, 

 or its needs and experiences varied enough, to exhaust their 

 possibilities. 



If the student hopes to follow the mazes of racial characters as 

 they traverse the generations, like threads through the patterns 

 of a fabric, he must not confuse either his terminology or his 

 ideas by attaching so important a conception as "character" 

 to what is nothing more than an individual manifestation of 

 character development, or the particular personal use to which 

 many racial characters may be put. 



The faculties of the individual are limited in kind to the 

 faculties of the race, and in degree to the intensity of their 

 inheritance and the conditions of life. There is no case in 

 which an individual of one race has picked up or otherwise 

 acquired a character that belongs to another race and not to 

 his own. All his achievements, all his capacities, are within 

 the limits of his racial characters and the conditions controlling 

 their development. 



The individual is in actual possession of all the characters of 

 the race. That this is true is shown by breeding experiences 

 everywhere, for in all cases the individual transmits to some 

 degree all the characters of his race. Milk secretion is a char- 

 acter limited to mammals and functional only in the female sex, 

 yet every dairyman knows that the bull will transmit milking 

 qualities as successfully as will the cow. 



Our experience with reversions those " long-lost charac- 

 ters " that return to plague us is convincing proof of the fact 

 that every character of the race is potentially present in every 

 individual, whether the degree of development be much or little. 

 In no other manner could they be so long and so persistently 

 preserved in the race. Their repeated appearance, long after 

 they have ceased to be typical, only shows that they were never 

 truly lost. 



The individual is, therefore, born with all the possibilities of 

 the race to which he belongs. Those which shall develop and 

 fix the type will depend upon two considerations, first, the 



