274 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



Through the organization of an ideal transmitted 

 through this social heredity any result whatever 

 that may be aimed at may be produced in the world. 

 The science of heredity transmitted through culture 

 is the science of Power upon which the attention 

 of all who desire to change the world will be con- 

 centrated in the future. Let us turn therefore and 

 look at some of the facts which help us to under- 

 stand the first principles of this science. 



For the past fifteen years I have been engaged 

 on a series of experiments on heredity which 

 exhibit the reach and influence of social heredity 

 as distinct frpm inborn heredity in a manner which 

 it is of the first importance to understand. The 

 attention of science has been so exclusively directed 

 in the past to the study of inborn heredity that as 

 a rule no other kind of heredity has been discussed 

 or even thought of. This has been particularly 

 so in the case of animals. One of the most interest- 

 ing results obtained in these experiments was that 

 the heredity of every species of wild animal upon 

 which I experimented was found to consist of two 

 kinds, inborn heredity and social heredity. The 

 latter was nearly always found to be the most strik- 

 ing and the most important in its effects. 



There has been no more widely held idea in the 

 past than that the characteristic habits of any 



