Social Consequences of Heredity. 381 



supplanting brute force, and the progress of social life has but little 

 influence on bodily vigour. 



' Will it be by the development of swiftness or agility ? Probably 

 not. In the savages they are important elements of the ability to 

 maintain life ; but in the civilized man they aid self-preservation 

 in quite a minor degree, and there seems no circumstance likely 

 to necessitate an increase of them. 



* Will it be by development of mechanical skill ? Most likely in 

 some degree. Awkwardness is continually entailing injuries and 

 deaths. Moreover, the complicated tools which civilization brings 

 into use are constantly requiring greater delicacy of manipulation. 

 All the arts, industrial and aesthetic, as they develop, imply a 

 corresponding development of perceptive and executive faculties in 

 men the two necessarily act and react. 



' Will it be by development of intelligence ? Largely no doubt. 

 There is ample room for advance in this direction, and ample 

 demand for it. Our lives are universally shortened by our igno- 

 rance. In attaining complete knowledge of our own natures, and 

 of the natures of surrounding things, we shall better understand the 

 conditions of existence to which we must conform. 



' Will it be by the development of morality, by a greater power 

 of self-regulation ? Largely so : perhaps most largely. Right 

 conduct is usually come short of more from defect of will than 

 defect of knowledge. To the due co-ordination of those complex 

 actions which constitute human life in its civilized form, there goes 

 not only the pre-requisite recognition of the proper course; but the 

 further pre-requisite a due impulse to pursue that course. A 

 further development of those feelings which civilization is develop- 

 ing in us must be acquired before the crimes, excesses, diseases, 

 improvidences, dishonesties, and cruelties, that now so greatly 

 diminish the duration of life, can cease. 



' No more in the case of man than in the case of any other 

 being, can we presume that evolution has taken place, or will here- 

 after take place, spontaneously. In the past, at present, and in the 

 future, all modifications, functional and organic, have been, are, 

 and must be immediately or remotely consequent on surrounding- 

 conditions. What, then, are those changes in the environment to 

 which, by direct or indirect equilibration, the human organism has 



