Note 14 — Chapter VIII · CONCLUSION

The answer of Rationalism has already been indicated—it is to the force of environment (in its broadest sense) that we must look in our struggle with hereditary weaknesses. We cannot get rid of our inherited qualities; but we can modify them by changing our environment. If our early education, our early environment, has been neglected, we still have it in our power to remedy, or partly remedy, this unfortunate circumstance by our choice of present environment. The hard case is that of a man so situated that to change his evil environment seems well-nigh impossible. Therefore it is that the reduction of pernicious environments is of paramount importance to the race, and this truth the rationalistic spirit of the age is now forcing to the front. Also, if the individual takes no interest in posterity, and refuses to study the question of heredity, the day will come when the law of the land will see to it that the sins or diseases of the fathers shall not be visited upon the children “unto the third and fourth generation.” It is the quality, not the quantity, of our children that we have to keep to the forefront.14 The methods will be simple, if somewhat drastic; but the need to apply them will continue to lessen in proportion as the laws of heredity and environment are better kept in view. “Over the past, represented by our own heredity, we have no control. We cannot change the facts which have made the degenerate, the neurotic, the hysterical, and the criminal; but these are only names for human beings who, by a certain train of causation, have had certain impulses developed and others left fallow or suppressed. A different train of causation will awaken the capabilities to hold these impulses in due check. This future, now represented by the environment, is greatly within our power. Heredity being but the transmitted effects of past environments, we have to make a suitable environment for growing organisms if we wish to mould them to our ideals; and this is the meaning of education.”15