30 ALFRED T. SCHOFIELD, ESQ., M.D., M.E.C.S.E., ON 



alities : tendencies which, by education and culture, can be 

 converted into flowers or weeds, into virtues or into vices. 

 This is the case nearly all round. It is true even in our 

 physical nature. It is very rare indeed for a man to inherit 

 a disease, but it is exceedingly common for him to inherit a 

 tendency to disease ; and this saves us from fatalism, because 

 Ave are certain that in time we may prevent the tendency, 

 but we cannot prevent a fact that is already established. 

 Therefore, I repeat, instead of looking on children as ready 

 formed compendiums of virtues and vices, we rather look on 

 them as teeming with endless potentialities, filled as they 

 are, with tendencies that have been derived from their 

 ancestry. Let me give an illustration of this. 



Battered and defaced though the Divine image may 

 be in the human mind it is still clearly to be traced, 

 and especially in infancy. All infants are distinguished 

 by inheriting two remarkable tendencies, or principles. 

 The one is love, and the other is justice. All children 

 love, and all children, in infancy, have a most marked 

 sense of justice or right, which often causes them great 

 distress when they find the limits overstepped by those 

 whom they are taught to believe are wiser than tliem- 

 selves. Now love and right are, simply, love and light, and 

 love and light are essentials in the character of God. God 

 has impressed these two qualities on every infant mind. 

 But, observe, that love may be changed into a positive vice 

 when it becomes love of self, or pure egoism. Justice itself 

 may be changed mto positive evil if it is developed into 

 nothing but standing up for one's own rights. On the other 

 hand, the two may be made to blossom and bloom into two 

 most beautiful virtues — the love of others and standing up 

 for the rights of others : in short, we have tendencies which 

 may become altruistic or egoistic virtues or vices. This i& 

 effected by the training of these potentialities, which is. 

 lars-ely carried on in early life by the unconscious influences 

 by'vvhich the child is surrounded. Environments and sug- 

 gestions are, undoubtedly, two strong forces by which a 

 child's early life should be trained — by which its infant 

 mind is evolved — suggestions of good and not of evil : 

 for suggestions have an enormous weight when those sug- 

 gestions come from one having such a powerful influence 

 over a girl or child as its own mother. It is hardly too much 

 to say that a mother is nearly as all-powerful over a child's 

 mind as that of a hypnotizer over the hypnotized: the re— 



