35 Heredity. 



only of ordinary people, whose life passes away on a restricted stage, 

 who die and are forgotten. 



Education is a sum of habits : among civilized nations it builds 

 up an edifice so skilfully contrived, so complicated, so labo- 

 riously raised, that we are astonished if we examine it in detail. 

 Compare the savage with the accomplished gentleman, and how 

 great is the difference. The fact is that six thousand years and 

 more stand between the two. Many of the habits which we con- 

 tract through education have cost the race centuries of effort. 

 Education has to fix in us the results achieved by many hundreds 

 of generations. Millions of men have been needed to invent and 

 bring to perfection those methods which develop the body, culti- 

 vate the mind, and fashion the manners. Consider what is implied 

 in the words ' a complete education.' To know how to walk, to 

 run, to wrestle, to fence, to ride, and all other bodily exercises; to 

 know several languages, to make verses, and study music, drawing, 

 painting ; to reflect and reason; to be conformed to the customs, 

 usages, and conventionalities of society. Each of these acts, and 

 many others, must needs have become a habit, an almost mechan- 

 ical mode of life in us, and a perfect education results from the 

 fusion of these habits. There must needs have been formed in us, 

 by many artificial processes, a second nature, which so envelops our 

 original nature as to seem to have absorbed it. Most commonly, 

 however, such is not the case. It is not rare in our own times to 

 find in families of high, and even princely station, individuals over- 

 laid with such an education as this, but it is only a very thin 

 covering indeed a glossy varnish that on the slightest friction 

 scales off, and then the true, that is the brute, nature appears with 

 all its savage instincts and unbridled appetites; in an instant it 

 bursts all the bonds which civilization has imposed upon it, and 

 finds itself, as it were, at home in barbarism. We are sometimes 

 amazed at seeing nations highly civilized, gentle, humane, charit- 

 able in time of peace, giving themselves up to every excess so soon 

 as war has broken out. The reason of this is that war, being a 

 return to the savage state, awakens the primitive nature of man, 

 as it subsisted prior to culture, and brings it back with all its 

 heroic daring, its worship of force, and its boundless lusts. 



As Carlyle has said, civilization is only a covering underneath 



