HEREDITY IN PHYSIOLOGY, IN MEDICINE, ETC. 347 
be highly unscientific to deny that hereditary influences 
are manifest in predispositions and fixed tendencies; but 
it would be quite as inexact to maintain that these im- 
plicitly contain the future conditions and control the evolu- 
tion of the psychical being. 
There is nothing more complicated than education. We 
cannot here undertake to go to the depths of its general 
management, which has been the subject of so many vol- 
umes. The importance everywhere attributed to works 
on the training of children is in itself alone a protest 
against the abuse of theories on heredity. A few novel 
details as to one of the main instruments of education, the 
instinct of imitation, and as to the share it has in the de- 
velopment of individuals and races, will suffice to teach an 
estimate of the power of those influences alien to heredity. 
A learned English historian, Bagehot, has lately written 
some admirable pages to prove how strong an influence the 
unconscious imitation of a popular character or type, and 
the general favor shown to this character or this type, the 
traits of which are instinctively copied by the public, exerts 
over the formation of customs and of tastes, while at the 
same time giving the key to periodical revolutions in such 
tastes and customs. Jn his view, national character is 
nothing else than local character which has made its way 
upward, precisely as the national tongue is merely the 
lasting extension of a local dialect. Nothing is more real 
than the force of that tendency to imitation, in consequence 
of which, in industry, the arts, literature, and manners, cer- 
tain ways of doing, devised under very special conditions, 
gain general prevalence, and very soon impress themselves, 
at first on the unreflecting and obedient multitude, and 
then upon those who have most ability to test and resist 
them. This leads to the remark that the chosen few are 
almost always forced to follow the tastes and demands of 
the many, under pain of being neglected or despised. A 
