HEREDITY AND RACE-IMPROVEMENT. 171 



monstrate the constant and powerful influence of those forces which, 

 as we have said, tend to modify, transform, and complicate man's 

 thoughts, feelings, passions, manners, customs. 



The special aim of education is to transmit to the child the sum of 

 those habits to which be is to conform the course of his life, and of 

 those branches of knowledge which are indispensable for him in the 

 pursuit of his calling ; and it must begin by developing in the pupil 

 the faculties which will enable him to make these habits and this 

 knowledge his own. It teaches the child to speak, to move about, to 

 look, to use his senses, to hear, to understand, to judge, to love. But 

 now the influence of education, opposed as it is to that of heredity, is 

 so great, that in most cases it is of itself alone capable of producing 

 a moral and psychological likeness between children and parents. If 

 heredity determined irresistibly and infallibly in the descendants the 

 essential characters of their ancestors' personality, education would be 

 superfluous. When once it is admitted that education, a long, watch- 

 ful, laborious training, is indispensable in order to call forth and per- 

 fect in the child the development of aptitudes and of mental qualities, 

 we must conclude that heredity acts only a secondary part in the won- 

 derful genesis of the moral individual. The argument is unassailable. 

 That hereditary influences make their mark in predispositions, in fixed 

 tendencies, it were unscientific to deny ; but yet it would be inexact 

 to pretend that they implicitly contain the future states of the psy- 

 chical being, and determine its evolution. 



There is nothing more complex than education, nor must we think 

 here of studying its general economy, which has been the theme of so 

 many books. The importance which is generally attributed to works 

 on pedagogy is of itself a protest against the abuse of hereditarian 

 theories. Some fresh details as to one of the chief agencies in educa- 

 tion, viz., the instinct of imitation, and the part it plays in the de- 

 velopment of individuals and of races, will suffice to demonstrate the 

 energy of certain influences which have nothing to do with heredity. 



An accomplished English historian, Bagehot, recently published 

 some excellent observations, which go to show what great influence is 

 exerted in the formation of customs and of tastes, and also how their 

 periodic revolutions are explained, by the unconscious imitation of a 

 favorite character or type, and by the general favor accorded to the 

 same. According to him, a national character is only a local character 

 which has been favored by fortune, precisely as a national language is 

 only the definitive extension of a local dialect. There is nothing more 

 undoubted than the force of this tendency to imitation. It is in vir- 

 tue of this that certain processes in manufacture, art, literature, man- 

 ners, discovered under peculiar circumstances, attain a general ascen- 

 dency, and are rapidly imposed, first upon the docile and unthinking 

 multitude, and then on those who possess all the means of inquiry and 

 resistance. Here it may be observed that the 'elite are almost always 



