THE LESSON OF HEREDITY 



But the essential thing is that in each case the hero 

 must triumph. He may swagger with hands in pockets, 

 or perhaps boast and swear in choicest Bowery dialect ; 

 his pathos may be, for more refined ears, suspiciously 

 like bathos; his courage may be bravado; but always, 

 in the intellectual eye of his audience, he must be an 

 approach to an ideal hero, good, noble, aspiring, or 

 he cannot receive the plaudits of even the worst audi- 

 ence. 



Why? 



Because we look to stage and story for ideals, and the 

 same ideal aspirations have been inherited from remote 

 common ancestors by both extremes of our social life. 



The fact, then, is everywhere patent that heredity 

 accounts for the sameness of our race, not for the 

 differences. The latter are the work of environment. 

 It is further true that it is the plan of Nature to use, 

 for convenience' sake, the old language of teleology 

 to avoid extremes and keep as near as may be to the 

 happy mean through the aid of heredity. It is as if she 

 looked with equal affection upon every tendency once 

 implanted in a race of her creatures, and strove always 

 to aid the tendencies that were for the moment sub- 

 ordinated. To accomplish this end she adopts a very 

 simple but very effectual expedient. We express this 

 expedient commonly in the saying that opposites at- 

 tract. This means, in the light of what we have just 

 seen, that a person is drawn towards a person of the 

 opposite sex whose predominating tendencies cor- 

 respond to his subordinated ones. By this means 

 tendencies subordinated in one generation are rein- 



