220 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. II. No. 34 



to my book (Chaps, on ' Suggestion ' and 

 ' Emotion ') . 



I have there traced out in some detail 

 what other writers also have lately set in 

 evidence, i. e., that in the child's personal 

 development, his ontogenesis, his life his- 

 tory, he makes a very faithful reproduction 

 of his social conditions. He is, from child- 

 hood up, excessively receptive to social sug- 

 gestion; his entire learning is a process of 

 conforming to social patterns. The essen- 

 tial to this, in his heredity, is excessive in- 

 stability, cerebral balance and equilibrium, 

 a readiness to overflow into the new chan- 

 nels which his social environment dictates. 

 He has to learn everything for himself, and 

 in order to do this he must begin in a state 

 of great plasticity and mobility. Now, my 

 point, but briefly, is that these social lessons 

 which he learns for himself take the place 

 largely of the heredity of particular pater- 

 nal acquisitions. The father must have 

 been plastic to learn, and this plasticity is, 

 as far as evidence goes, the nervous condi- 

 tion of acute consciousness; the father then 

 learned, through his consciousness, from 

 his social environment. The child does the 

 same. What he inherits is nervous plas- 

 ticity and the consciousness. He learns 

 particular acts for himself; and what he 

 learns is, in its main line, what his father 

 learned. So he is just as well off, the child 

 of Preformism, as if he had been the heir of 

 the particular lessons of his father's past. 

 I have called this process ' Social Hereditj^,' 

 since the child really inherits the details ; 

 but he inherits them from societj^ by this 

 process of social growth, rather than by di- 

 rect natural inheritance. 



To show this in a sketchy way, I may 

 take the last three points which Professor 

 Cope makes iinder the Epigenesis column, 

 the points which involve consciousness, 

 and show how I think they may still be true 

 to the Preformist if he avail himself of the 

 resource otfered by ' Social Heredity.' 



I do this rather for convenience than with 

 any wish to controvei't Professor Cope; and 

 it majf well be that his later statements 

 may show that even this amount of refer- 

 ence to him is not justified. 



1. (5 of Cope's table.) "Movements 

 of the organism are caused or directed by 

 sensation and other conscious states." 



The point at issue here between the ad- 

 vocate of Epigenesis and the Preformist 

 would be whether it is necessary that the 

 child should inherit any of the particular 

 conscious states, or their special nervous 

 dispositions, which the parent learned in his 

 lifetime, in order to secure through them 

 the performance of the same actions by the 

 child. I should say, no ; and for the rea- 

 son — additional to the usual arguments of 

 the Preformists — that ' Social Heredity ' 

 will secure the same result. All we have 

 to have in the child is the high conscious- 

 ness represented by the tendency to imitate 

 the parent or to absorb social copies, and 

 the general law now recognized by psychol- 

 ogists under the name of Dynamogenesis — 

 i. e., that the thought of a movement tends 

 to discharge motor energy into the channels 

 as near as may be to those necessary for 

 that movement.* Given these two elements 

 of endowment in the child, and he can learn 

 anything that his father did, without inher- 

 iting any particular acts learned by the 

 parent. And we must in any case give the 

 child this much ; for the principle of Dyna- 

 mogenesis is a fundamental law in all or- 

 ganisms, and the tendency to take in exter- 

 nal ' copies ' bj^ imitation, etc., is present in 

 all social animals, as a matter of fact. 



The only hindrance that I see to the 

 child's learning everything that his life in 

 society requires would be just the thing 

 that the advocates of Epigenesis argue for 

 — the inheritance of acquired characters. 

 For such inheritance would tend so to bind 



*Botli of these reiiuirenients are worked out in de- 

 tiiil ill my book. 



