ORGANIC EVOLUTION — MENTAL 169 



of a moral nature, for whatever is moral iu an individual 

 appears later, at a time when the imitative instincts 

 have come into play. In the third place, morals are 

 evidently affairs of time and place; — ^that which we now 

 hold to be right was in other times held to be wrong, 

 that which we now hold to be wrong is in other lands 

 held to be right : our pagan ancestors persecuted the 

 Christians ; our Christian ancestors persecuted the Jews 

 and Pagans ; we hold religious persecution to be the most 

 heinous of crimes. The Thugs approve of murder, 

 the American Indians of robbery, the Chinese of 

 infanticide, the Japanese of suicide, the Africans of 

 cannibalism, the Turks of polygamj', some Indian 

 hill tribes of polyandry, the Masai of promiscuous 

 sexual intercourse, and so forth. On the other hand, 

 we habitually do, without any sense of wrong-doing, 

 that which other peoples esteem highly criminal; for 

 instance, we eat flesh, and in particular beef and 

 pork. 



In the medley of moral systems two things are 

 positively clear. First, that no system is inborn, but all 

 are acquired ; and second, that persistence of a moral 

 system, during any number of generations, does not 

 cause it to become inborn, i. e. acquired moral natures 

 do not become transmissible no matter how often 

 acquired ; they are handed from parent to child as 

 language is, or, as I may even say, as property is, not as 

 eyes and teeth are; as is proved by the indubitable 

 fact that the children of any race (e.g. Anglo-Saxons), 

 if reared by another race (e.g. American Indians), 

 develop the moral nature of the educators, not of the 

 progenitors. Perhaps there is nothing more character- 

 istic of the English than corporal modesty ; there are 

 among us women who would rather die than expose 

 portions of their persons to the public gaze, or even to 

 the gaze of accredited individuals, as every surgeon 



