POWER IN CIVILIZATION 118 



tion can be fully distinguished. A zoologist in the 

 front rank who has carried the purely biological 

 phase of this subject furthest since I wrote is Sir 

 Edwin Ray Lankester, F.R.S. In the article on 

 Zoology in the current edition of the Encyclopedia 

 Britannica this writer has recently remarked with 

 great emphasis on the significance to civilization 

 of the mechanism of that kind of social inheritance 

 which I described in Social Evolution. 



Sir Edwin Ray Lankester describes the main fact 

 with which it is concerned as " a new and unpre- 

 cedented factor in organic development." All 

 inquiry in the past has been, he asserts, dominated 

 by erroneous ideas. The heredity with which 

 civilization is supremely concerned is not that 

 which is inborn in the individual. It is the social 

 inheritance which constitutes the dominant factor 

 in human progress, this kind of heredity being, to 

 use Sir Edwin Ray Lankester 's words, " completely 

 free from the limitations of protoplasmic con- 

 tinuity. ... It grows and develops," he continues, 

 " by laws other than those affecting the perishable 

 bodies of successive generations of mankind," so 

 that in every generation the child has to begin 

 with, as it were, a clean slate, the inheritance thus 

 conveyed exercising " an incomparable influence on 



the educable brain." 

 8 



