Genetics and Ethics 309 



religion are the results of the environment and education of our 

 early years. It cannot he doubted that if we had heen horn in 

 other countries or ages we should have been different from our 

 present selves in many important respects; if we had been horn 

 and reared in the slums of great cities we should have been other 

 than we are; indeed if the little illnesses, accidents and contin- 

 gencies of our lives had been different we should have been dif- 

 ferent in our bodies and minds, as identical twins come to differ 

 from each other under such circumstances. The conditions of 

 early life and education have a great influence in shaping person- 

 ality and are almost as much beyond the control of the individual 

 as is heredity. 



If personality in all of its main features is fixed by heredity and 

 environment over which the individual has little or no control, 

 and this is certainly true, personality is as inevitably determined 

 by its antecedents as is any other natural phenomenon. This is, 

 I believe, a conclusion from which there is no escape. How then 

 is it possible to believe in freedom and responsibility? Is there 

 not justification for the view so often expressed of late that man 

 is never free and that responsibility and duty are mere delusions ? 



III. Determinism and Responsibility 



Many persons who have thought upon these subjects have felt, 

 apparently, that there was no tenable middle ground between ex- 

 treme voluntarism and extreme mechanism; man has been re- 

 garded as a "free agent" or a mere "automaton," absolutely free 

 or absolutely bound, wholly indeterminate or wholly predeter- 

 mined. But these extreme views are unreal, unscientific and un- 

 justifiable, for they contradict the facts of experience. We have 

 the assurance of experience that we are not absolutely free nor 

 absolutely bound, but that we are partly free and partly bound; 

 the alternatives are not merely freedom or determinism, but 

 rather freedom and determinism. 



1. Determinism not Fatalism. — Whatever the philosophical 

 meaning of "determinism" may he, all that is meant by that term 



