HEREDITY AND EUGENICS. 279 
The Spiritualists will divide into two camps: (a) those who 
hold that the lower ranges of mental life are strictly and closely 
connected with bodily life will expect to find Heredity obtain 
for them, reserving only a region of higher mental life into 
which transference from the lower is inadmissible, and in which 
the problem of Heredity must be examined quite de novo; and 
(6) those who hold that all mind is essentially spiritual, the 
lower ranges being dependent upon the higher, and who there- 
fore can tind no ground for transferring to mental life any laws 
discovered to be true for the processes of physical life ; for these 
the whole enquiry is a new one, quite independent of any other. 
It is open to all therefore to enter upon an inductive enquiry 
as to the appearance of likenesses between successive generations, 
and to all but the thorough-going Spiritualist to regard the 
likenesses as due to transmission, 2.¢., to heredity. 
That children resemble their pareuts in mental character is, 
of course, matter of common observation, that they also differ 
from them is also beyond controversy: but which is the 
dominant thing, the resemblance or the difference ? 
The evidence for the dominance of resemblance and the 
probability of its being due to heredity is what strikes 
attention most forcibly. Men are born in races in their mental 
as in their physical nature: every member of a race has a fairly 
definite ageregate of qualities which are repeated from father 
to son: the wide contrast between Mongol aud Aryan; the 
further grouping of characters as European or Hindu; 
furtiier still as Frenchman or Swede, and so on. Whether or 
not we may suppose anything in mind on a par with the 
germ-plasm of physical organisms, to which we could attribute 
the processes of transmission iu a similar way, psycholovists 
have not yet investiyated: at present they are dominated by 
the belief that the transmission is effected on the side of the 
physical organism and that mental life follows upon that. 
Further, that qualites of character become fixed, and fixed 
in combinations, after the Mendelian manner is plain, but 
whether or not they follow Mendehan principles in trans- 
mission no one has yet had time to work out. 
but whether the liws of mental heredity are either identical 
with those of physical heredity, or similar to them, or not, the 
strong meutal resemblance between parent and offspring, and 
the formation of race characters, national characters, even 
occupation-characters, is so wide ranying that ethnology seems 
to give Heredity the principal function in the formation of 
meutal character. 
B 
