46 HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 



which can scarcely be called mind at all; no 

 fact in human experience is fraught with 

 greater practical and philosophical significance 

 than this, and yet no fact is more generally 

 disregarded. We know that the greatest men 

 of the race were once babies, embryos, germ 

 cells, and that the greatest minds in human 

 history were once the minds of babies, em- 

 bryos and germ cells, and yet this stupendous 

 fact has had but little influence on our beliefs 

 as to the nature of man and of mind. We 

 rarely think of Plato and Aristotle, of Shake- 

 speare and Newton, of Pasteur and Darwin, 

 except in their full epiphany, and yet we know 

 that when each of these was a child he "thought 

 as a child and spake as a child," and when 

 he was a germ cell he behaved as a germ cell. 



The development of the mind from the ac- 

 tivities of the germ cells is certainly most won- 

 derful and mysterious, but probably no more 

 so than the development of the complicated 

 body of the adult animal from the structures 

 of the germ. Both belong to the same order 

 of phenomena and there is no more reason for 

 supposing that the mind is supernaturally 



