Heredity, Variation and Genius 6r 



pathetically powerful as tradition, custom, con- 

 vention and sameness of environment are to 

 fashion swarms of automatic beings who think 

 and do the same irrational things in the same 

 routine ways — a mode of mechanical fashioning 

 which may certainly account for much that is 

 often ascribed to heredity — and that so fatuously 

 and faithfully that they had rather break one 

 of the ten commandments and " perish ever- 

 lastingly " than be out of fashion or perpetrate a 

 breach of social etiquette and be proscribed 

 socially, yet there appear from time to time on 

 the one hand recalcitrants who, rebelling against 

 the customary restraints, go their own ways of 

 development or degeneration, and on the other 

 hand defective beings who are incapable of being 

 fashioned into decent social members. One may 

 safely affirm that an unremitting instillation of 

 moral principles from the appearance of his first 

 tooth onwards to the loss of all his teeth by a 

 natural decay would not avail to make a moral 

 being of the congenital moral imbecile ; safely 

 suspect too that no training could ever have trans- 

 muted the moral nature of Judas Iscariot into that 

 of Jesus the son of Sirach, still less into that of 

 Jesus of Nazareth.* 



* If Judas was really the unspeakably vile traitor which 

 tradition accounts him. A good deal might be said in support 

 of the theory that, believing literally in the royal mission and 

 miraculous power of the Messiah, he wished to precipitate the 

 predicted glorious reign on earth which all the disciples eagerly 



