286 REV. PROF. A. CALDECOTT, D.LIYT., D.D., ON 
of those who have such quite different views of individuality 
and personality as those I have endeavoured to indict. 
In the naturalist view, the imperfection or defect in a man 
may be so radical that his right to live fades away ; certainly 
the right to enter into domestic life and share the high 
privilege of a family and a home of his own must be denied 
him: the individual of to-day must be made to bow before the 
claims of posterity and of society. Now the believer in a high 
doctrine of personality is obliged to recognize that there is a 
wide range of defect and of corruption in human nature, and he 
has to allow that Society is right in taking away liberty 
from the imbecile, the insane, and the criminal, possibly for the 
whole course of their earthly life. But respect for personality 
underlies the caution with which such restrictions are now 
imposed, and it is one of the most prominent marks of the 
advance of civilization that their application should be more 
and more cautiously and reluctantly made, and that always 
there should be anxious endeavour to remove the defect and to 
reform the criminal so as to allow the restrictions to be removed 
as soon as possible. But the lower regard for individuality 
obviously tends to work in the opposite direction. To the forms 
of insanity and crime disease is to be added as a reason for 
segregation and enforcement of the celibate life: and the range 
of insanity and of crime which are to be the grounds for 
interference is to be indefinitely widened. It would be 
different if the course taken were the making appeal to good 
sense and public spirit and the virtue of self-sacrifice, as personal 
motives in the individual for voluntarily renouncing family 
affections ; but this appeal cannot be directed with much 
prospect of success in the very cases before us, the imbecile, the 
diseased, the insane, and the criminal. For the convinced 
believer in the dominance of Heredity in human nature both 
physical, mental, and moral, there is therefore no remedy but a 
wide extension of forcible restriction imposed upon individuals 
by society. 
It is therefore an extremely practical issue which is raised by 
the differences of conviction as to the extent to which Heredity 
affects human character. The improvement of society which 
all hope to see and all would endeavour to promote is under- 
taken on quite different methods according to the Naturalistic 
or the Personalistic view of human nature. 
The Personalist, as I have said, holds that every child of man 
comes into being with a central freshness and potentiality over 
and above the inheritance which attaches to the physical trame 
