240 A STUDY IN HEREDITY 



language or of letters, or of the uses of steam, or of the bicycle, the 

 altruistic feelings are purely acquired (and not transmissible), and 

 are not immediate products of evolution, but result indirectly 

 from the evolution of man's mental receptivity, that is, from the 

 evolution of his vast power of acquiring mental characters. Men 

 in various times and places have been taught to worship sticks 

 and stones, and to hold in reverence all kinds of absurd beliefs 

 and notions ; so also a child — any child — by fit training may be 

 rendered highly altruistic — may be taught to receive and practise 

 altruism, as he may be taught to receive and reverence fetishism ; 

 whence it follows, as a logical conclusion, that in every individual 

 the altruistic feelings are purely acquired. It matters not that, in 

 a greater or less degree, they are universal. So is knowledge of 

 language and religion, which, though universal, is as much 

 acquired as is knowledge of history or of astronomy. If, then, in 

 the ancestry of man, these feelings were ever instinctive, as we 

 may suppose them to be among bees, this instinct, like almost all 

 others, was lapsed long ago, and was replaced by an acquired 

 character. We need not wait, then, the slow evolution of the social 

 millennium by the accumulation of inborn altruistic variations, 

 as Mr Kidd expects, nor by the accumulation (and transmission) 

 of acquired variations, as Mr Spencer expects. Were we all 

 agreed as to the training of our children, it would be achievable in 

 the very next generation, for surely, if a generation can be reared 

 to reverence a stick or a stone, an inanimate idol, and this or that 

 grotesque religious system, it can be reared also to love and 

 reverence man. 



One paragraph more and I am done. We hear of the 

 evolution of morals or of language or of religion, of the printing 

 press, of the locomotive, of the bicycle, and so forth. In the 

 popular mind, and, I fear, even in the minds of some scientific 

 men, this evolution ranks as a process of the same order as the 

 evolution of an animal. Evolution means unfolding, and, 

 therefore, the word is perhaps correctly applied to the bicycle, 

 etc. But there is this essential difference between a living being 

 and the bicycle. The former is the progeny of a parent ; the 



