344 BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN PROBLEMS 



the will, for this is an illusory feeling, associated 

 with necessary and inevitable protoplasmic reactions, 

 excited by stimuli which, acting on a brain of given 

 organization and experience, could have no other 

 outcome except that which in fact transpired. If 

 this view be reflective of the actual, we must regard 

 the conduct and the fate of any race of men or 

 animals as conditioned essentially by the nature of 

 the protoplasm in which it had its origin and espe- 

 cially by the properties of its nervous protoplasm. 

 We cannot predict the future of any race or any indi- 

 vidual because we know neither what the environ- 

 ment holds in store, nor what are the inherent proper- 

 ties of the reactive protoplasm. The best we can 

 hope to do is to predict that in a given set of condi- 

 tions a race of observed traits will react in such a way 

 as to reveal certain tendencies making for self-preser- 

 vation or for destruction, for psychical improvement 

 or for debasement. The future of any man or race 

 of men is definitely predetermined in the protoplasm. 

 But the environmental stimuli which evoke the 

 reactions we call conduct are not of a chance nature ; 

 down to their minutest details they, too, are part of 

 an inevitable system. Hence we cannot escape the 

 conclusion that although man lives in the midst of a 

 world having the appearance of almost infinite plas- 

 ticity and uncertainty, his life unfolds itself with 

 relentless rigidity in the midst of an equally fixed 

 sequence of external phenomena. 



