HEREDITY AND EUGENICS. 283 
as it comes within the limitations imposed by the physical 
framework. The former will hold that every personality enters 
into connection with a preformed mass of mental dispositions, 
instinets, and tendencies besides the settled peculiarities of his 
bodily frame: a tendency to strong or to weak emotionality, for 
example, a disposition for intellectual activity or an aversion 
from it, an inclination to egotism or towards benevolence, and so 
forth ; and that these may be brought under heredity and its 
laws. The other view claims that every soul of man starts 
fresh, and can enter upon a self-chosen and _ self-directed course 
of life. One view would say that given the parentage and 
ancestry, the stock in short, there is but small room for 
individual personality to work out freely in, and expects to find 
resemblance entirely dominating the characters of children of 
the same stock. The other view consider that the similarities 
we find are rather the result of similar environment, education 
and opportunity, and is not surprised when novelty appears, 
when individuals of high power stand forth and defy the 
expectations which heredity raises. From this view it would 
be said that grapes might be gathered from thistles in the field 
of human character, only that the saying is inept, for the 
reference to the realm of physical nature is quite out of place 
as the ground of a comparison. And in support of it the 
insurgence of individuals from the lines of development fore- 
shadowed by looking at their stock or their environment 
demonstrates the possibility of self-originality, self-directing 
euidance of life ; and when the possibility is shown the situation 
is revolutionized ; the course of heredity fails in these cases, and 
suspicion 1s thrown upon it all over the field. 
It I am to state my own view, | should put it briefly in this 
way. It is impossible to account for consciousness as we know 
it by reference only to the consciousness we know. Con- 
sciousness is not self-explanatory as it appears in finite 
experience; we nust perforce look beyond experience, and the 
inference | stand by is to a super-finite consciousness from 
which we come, which may be said to express itself in us. And 
this finite consciousness is of the same nature in us all, but it 
enters into our physical frame, settled largely by inheritance, and 
is at once limited according to the peculiarities of that frame in 
various ways. And I think that observation establishes a large 
concomitance of mental dispositions. But there is also so 
much inherent power of self-direction that the course of the 
individual life may be either one of subjection to that frame or 
of domination over it, in many degrees. And I regard education 
