HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 89 



repressive action of the environment may be most 

 pernicious. Most precious potentialities j^dven by 

 ancestry may as well not have been given at all, 

 so completely does the environment ])revent their 

 realisation. The illustration of the infant Shake- 

 speare amongst savages is extreme ; but every one 

 can ponder on this point for himself. I will merely 

 allude to the many cases where some chance cir- 

 cumstance — i.e. sonje fact of the environment — has 

 disclosed powers of mind or body which were previ- 

 ously totally unknown to their possessor — if he can 

 be called their possessor so long as the environment 

 prevented him from entering into his inheritance. 



Observe, then, the admirable perfection of Herbert 

 Spencer's aphorism, "To prepare us for complete 

 living- is the function that education has to discharge." 

 The education, or CTivironment, provided which fails 

 to lead forth or which actively suppresses any de- 

 sirable potentiality of the germ is inadequate ; for 

 the function of education is to make possible com- 

 plete living — that is to say, the realisation of every 

 desirable potentiality which ancestry has implanted 

 in the germ. 



For instance, ancestry — by which I mean the whole 

 past of the race — may have implanted in the germ 

 a potentiality for the making of music. Hut this 

 potential character inuy ho a varidtion : the child's 

 father is not musical. The father, unfortunately, 

 who has not read the story of the little Handel, 

 knows nothing about Spencer's "complete living," 

 nothing about the duty of so forming the environ- 

 ment as to provide for the education or leading forth 

 of every desirable character of the germ, whether il 



