CHAPTER VI 



GENETICS AND ETHICS* 



Modern studies of development are profoundly changing the 

 opinions of men with respect to human personality. Observa- 

 tion of the relentless laws of heredity, of the inevitable influences 

 for good or bad of environmental conditions over which the indi- 

 vidual has no control, undoubtedly tends to produce a sense of 

 helplessness and hopelessness. What light is thrown upon the 

 great problems of freedom and determinism, of responsibility and 

 irresponsibility, of duty and necessity by modern studies of de- 

 velopment? Such questions cannot be dealt with quantitatively 

 or experimentally, and they lie outside the field of exact science, 

 but they are involved in all inquiries which have to do with ra- 

 tional and social beings ; they lie at the foundation of the appli- 

 cation of science to human welfare; they occupy a large place in 

 the thought and conduct of all men. 



I. The Voluntaristic Conception of Nature and of 

 Human Responsibility 



Primitive men regarded their own activities and all phenomena 

 of nature as the expression of will, and a similar view has been 

 maintained by certain philosophers and theologians even in mod- 

 ern times. Nature was regarded as the immediate expression of a 

 vast will which creates, rules, builds and destroys as it sees fit. 

 The lightning is hurled from the hand of Jove, the sea is dis- 



* A portion of this chapter was given as the presidential address hefore 

 the American Society of Naturalists in January, 1913, and was published 

 in Science under the title "Heredity and Responsibility." 



