Social Heredity

( Originally Published 1918 )

AS soon as we come to grasp the application of the principle of evolution described in the previous chapters, we can hardly fail to perceive that the significance of its bearing on the future of civilization is quite out of the ordinary. The peoples who apply to practical affairs the lessons which are involved will inevitably become the leaders and organizers of the world.

The future science of civilization may be summed up in a sentence. It will be the science of Power. It is waste of time to spend effort discussing other principles of society. There is only one type towards which the universal process of civilization moves the type of society in which Power is realized to the highest degree. It is therefore of the first importance to grasp firmly the essential facts that distinguish the science of Power in society from the science of Power every-where else throughout life.

Now it has been already said that Darwinism is strictly the science only of the evolution of the individual. It is not the science of the evolution of society. This latter science rests fundamentally on a principle which is never encountered in the evolution of the individual. It may be noticed in the world with which Darwin dealt that the mechanism, through which Power has been accumulated and perfected in the individual in the rise upwards through orders and types to the highest forms of life, is always the same. The entire order of progress rests on the single fact of the continued transmission of the winning qualities from generation to generation through heredity in the individual. In a few words the Darwinian hypothesis may be summarized. We are met in life by the fact of universal variation. Every organism is variable throughout.' Dar-win exhibited the process of natural selection, sorting out from this variation the characters useful to the individual in the struggle for existence, that is to say, the characters upon which Power rested. The universal means by which the gains of progress thus hall-marked as they arose were held and increased was the transmission of the winning qualities from generation to generation through inborn heredity in the individual. In the Darwinian conception thus all progress rests ultimately upon the mechanism of heredity in the individual.

It is for this reason that Darwinism in all its phases down to the latest Mendelian development is primarily concerned with inborn heredity. It is from the study of the facts and laws governing the transmission of qualities inborn in the individual that modern Darwinians found their claims to have important contributions to make to the science of human society. In the writings and researches of representatives like Galton and Bateson we are accordingly always in the presence of the sustained effort to exhibit the science of society as related to and dependent on the study of the laws of inborn inheritance in the individual. Human progress is presented to us as the scheme of organizing and controlling in the race the mechanism of individual heredity.

When with this feature of current Darwinian teaching in mind we turn now to human society, the first fact which holds attention is perceived to be of great importance as soon as we grasp its application. As society, like the individual, advances in evolution the gains of progress are accumulated and are transmitted from generation to generation by heredity. But here the parallel ceases. The mechanism of social heredity in no way resembles the mechanism of inborn heredity. The mechanism of inborn heredity is in the individual; the mechanism of social heredity is outside of the individual. The medium through which the gains of progress are held and are transmitted in the individual is inborn at birth, and is in the physical apparatus of his body as it has come down from the past. But the medium through which the gains of progress are held and transmitted in society is the accumulated social culture which comes down from the past. No part and no quality in this social inheritance is inborn in the individual. It is entirely acquired by him from without. It is imposed upon him by society in every generation.

Anthropologists have been disputing for a long time about the fact that the human brain does not appear for tens of thousands of generations past to have increased in size or quality in any marked manner. What is really meant by one side is that it has not increased in a manner which corresponds to the enormous and almost incalculable interval which separates the results of mind in modern civilized man from the results of mind in primitive man ages before the dawn of history.

But the point, the significance of which is nearly always overlooked in the controversy, is that the equipment which separates the mind of modern civilized man from the mind of primitive man is almost entirely an equipment which comes to the former through the cumulative social inheritance that he receives from civilization. This inheritance is not inborn in any of us. We have not yet fully grasped the immense import of the fact that since man became a social creature the winning variations upon which Power has rested in his evolution have been to an ever-increasing degree neither variations in the structure of his body nor in the size of his brain, but variations in the type of social culture to which he is being submitted.

The importance of the principle here emphasized, namely, that the Power which is characteristic of organized society rests upon and is transmitted through social heredity and does not rest upon and is not transmitted through heredity inborn in the individual, is incalculable. Fifty years hence the attention of civilization will, be permanently focused on this distinction as the cardinal fact in the science of Power.

The distinctive conception which in the past has underlain the ideas of modern Darwinians of all schools is that the control and organization of Power in the future of civilization will be in the hands of those who obtain possession of and who direct to preconceived ends the mechanism of heredity in the individual. This is a fundamental error. Those who understand the science of Power in society see that all Power in the future will be in the hands of those who obtain possession of and who direct to preconceived ends not the mechanism of individual heredity but the mechanism of social heredity. And the instrument of social heredity is the organized Culture of society.

What, therefore, is the peculiar nature of social heredity, and what have we to do to obtain possession of this source of omnipotent power in the future of civilization?

The marked features of social heredity in which it differs absolutely from that inborn heredity upon which Darwinians and many general theorists have attempted in the past to found a science of society are as follows. In inborn heredity the constituent qualities tend to be indefinitely persistent and difficult to alter. Despite all the work which has been done on the subject we have not yet arrived at any real knowledge or control of the causes of variation. The deeper our acquaintance with the subject the more clearly we perceive its uncertainties and its limited possibilities.' Slow change can only be produced in the elements of inborn heredity in the manner in which breeders attempt to produce change in plants and animals and in conditions which we can foresee to be quite impossible in human society in the future.

With the elements of social heredity every-thing is different. We can perceive at once, as soon as we grasp the principles of the subject, that it is along this line, namely, through the control of social heredity, that mind will ultimately direct the course of human evolution. For social heredity resting on mind is the direct basis of Power where Power will be supreme, namely, in its collective expressions. The most revolutionary change can be effected in a brief space of time through control of the elements of social heredity. The cause and agency of variation are here absolutely under the direction of mind. We can foresee that the control of social heredity will be practicable. And through the control of the elements of social heredity it will be an ideal not impossible of realization to transform the world in the lifetime of a few generations.

It is now some fifty years since one of the most blighting and retrograde conceptions which ever influenced the mind of civilization came to obtain wide currency in the West. As soon as the Darwinian hypothesis was accepted it was correctly perceived that it made all change and progress in life dependent on the laws of inheritance in the individual. At the same time it exhibited the qualities thus transmitted by inborn heredity as relatively so fixed and unchangeable that they were to be considered as almost beyond control in the lifetime of the individual.

Up to the time that Darwin published the Origin of Species, a different idea had been widely prevalent in Western thought and particularly in all teachings founded on the characteristic religious beliefs of the West that the mind of each generation, as represented in the child, was practically a blank sheet upon which good or evil might be written in the future according to the nature of the training or the nature of the education to which the young were subjected. Human character was presented in this conception as the result of training, and the note which underlay the effort of nearly all social and religious reformers had been a note of emphasis on the paramount importance of the environment in which the young were to be reared and educated.

One of the most revolutionary results of the Darwinian hypothesis in the West was to under-mine and discredit this conception. There was, of course, no doubt as to the transmission of in-born qualities by heredity in human beings just as in animals and in plants. But this fact came to obscure almost entirely to Darwinians the immensely more important fact that the qualities upon which efficiency and Power rest in collective evolution, as distinct from individual evolution, are qualities of character which are almost exclusively imposed and transmitted through social heredity. For a period of years the fact was completely lost sight of in science that the upward progress of the world in civilization rested on qualities in the individual imposed on the individual from without, and not on the nature of ancestral heredity inborn within him.

The influence of the retrograde Darwinian conception spread with lightning-like rapidity throughout Western thought. Darwinians like Galton, through a series of writings which attained wide publicity, fixed general attention in a marked manner on the nature of inborn heredity and brough forward ambitious schemes for the improvement of the race, conceived, not as in the past as dependent on the training and education of the young, but on success in selecting and breeding from the required strains of heredity in individuals after the manner of breeders of stock animals. Social reformers who accepted Galton's standpoint began, like Karl Pearson in the passages before quoted, to enlarge on the peculiar nature of inborn heredity in the individual and on the great length of time required to produce any fundamental change in human nature.

Within a short time the imaginative literature of the West was deeply affected. It became tinged throughout with the idea of biological predestination. The idea of the persistence and the relative unchangeableness of qualities in human nature resting on inborn heredity became a dominant note, uttered now, as it seemed, with authority coming direct from the leaders of science. The quality of inevitableness in inborn heredity conceived as overruling all the elements of motive and intention imposed on the individual by training was soon perceived to be a principle in art which was capable of yielding profound dramatic effect.

In the literature of Great Britain, Russia, Germany, and other countries it began to be used with telling effect in the novel and the drama. The dominating influence of inborn heredity was one of the principal conceptions through which a writer of international influence like Ibsen deeply moved the mind of the West. The Norwegian dramatist used it with powerful effect in some situations, as where in the play Ghosts he makes the tendencies of evil inborn heredity coming down through the father overbear in the son in the presence of the mother all the effects of training and religion imposed through life on the son.

In the writings of another author of international fame, like Anatole France, the conception of the determining influence of inborn heredity and its power to override in the individual all the effects of prolonged training became an instrument in the hands of genius through which the faith of a whole people was made to feel humiliated and abashed. There is no more poignant and cynical drama of human defeat than that exhibited by Anatole France in the story of the material and spiritual ruin of the Bishop of Trinqueballe who, after recalling from death three children of tender age but of evil parentage, caused them to be trained and educated in his own saintly principles. The inevitableness with which the gifted French writer made the elements of inborn heredity in the children to develop and in the end to completely triumph over the influences imposed on them by the Bishop through training and education is one of the most striking examples of the working of a principle in art which is capable of producing intense dramatic effects but which gradually shocked, startled, and in the end deeply impressed for evil the average mind throughout the West.

As the movement ran its course in literature its effects became many-sided. Following in the wake of the Darwinian development, conclusions about the effects of inborn heredity, such as were reached in the study of diseases by medical researchers, in the study of crime by criminologists like Lombroso, in the study of inheritance in plants and animals by Mendelians like Bateson, tended to be carried in literature far beyond their legitimate applications. They were made by imaginative theorists to supply the basis for vague, far-reaching generalizations about human society, and about races and nations, and even about civilization as a whole, the effect of which on the general mind throughout the West was profoundly disintegrating and demoralizing.

The movement came in time to influence widely social and political affairs even in world-wide aspects. Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, the founder of the branch of study to which he gave the name of Eugenics, may be said more than any single individual to have helped to give direction to theories about the effect of inborn heredity in peoples and races which it has taken the results of the two greatest wars in the world's history to counteract and permanently discredit in the Western mind.

Five years before Darwin published the Origin of Species, Galton in his Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa was giving wide currency to the view that the vast difference between the position in the world of the advanced' and less advanced races was due to a corresponding difference in their inborn mental qualities. The inborn mental faculties of aboriginal peoples, like the intelligent Damara tribes amongst whom he travelled in South Africa, were made by him the starting-point for generalizations which were widely repeated throughout civilization.

Galton formed a very low estimate of the mental capacity of peoples like the Damaras. The evidence upon which his conclusions were formed was mainly evidence to the fact that they could not count. When bartering for cattle, the Damaras appeared to have no conception of number. Two sticks of tobacco had to be put into the native's hand and one sheep driven away, and then an-other two sticks and the second sheep driven away, or he could not follow the transaction. Galton described how he observed a Damara floundering hopelessly in a calculation of this sort, while his own spaniel which had new-born puppies from which two or three had been re-moved was equally confused. She evidently, said Galton, had a vague notion of counting, but in the two attempts to grasp the nature of numbers, Galton remarked, "the comparison reflected no great honour on the man."

That the members even of the highest civilized race when without the artificial enumeration scale inherited from civilization have no more natural ability to count than the Damara whom Galton observed; that the children of African aborigines, and even the children of the aborigines of Australia, learn when taught the same things quite as easily and readily as the children of Europeans; and that the apparent difference which he noted between the mental faculties of the advanced and less advanced races of the world was due to the nature of their social inheritance and not to the nature of their inborn faculties, were matters which were beyond the horizon of Galton's mind at the time.

The standpoint in these matters of men of Galton's calibre was accepted widely throughout the educated world of the West. It was a firm belief at the time among a certain type of Galton's fellow-countrymen that the Englishman had a vast inborn mental superiority over other peoples with which he came in contact. Other nations held like beliefs about themselves. Informed and cultured Russians before the Russo-Japanese War spoke habitually of a people like the Japanese as yellow monkeys. A similar habit of mind pervaded in great strength the characteristic type of German literature which led up to the world war that opened in 1914. In all its phases that literature in Germany may be observed to have been saturated with the influence of the assumption that the Germanic races possessed some inborn mental heredity which made them superior to other peoples.

When the question is asked, What basis is there for the conception, thus put forward under so many recent forms in the West, which sets up inborn heredity as the determining influence in the evolution of civilization? The answer must be emphatic. The idea has no permanent basis in knowledge. The movement in the West which has essayed to establish the science of human progress on the control and organization of any peculiar inborn heredity either in races or in individuals is based on illusion. It is a movement which has given rise to one of the most pernicious and reactionary developments which has characterized the Western world for five centuries.

In the evolution of Power in civilization the heredity which controls everything is the social heredity which is transmitted through social culture. The greatest lesson which modern Germany has taught civilization in the world war which began in 1914 is not any of the lessons upon which attention has been mainly concentrated. It is the lesson that the collective heredity which is transmitted through culture is the master principle of the world. Every inborn quality in a people is ultimately subordinate to this social heredity. For the highest of all abilities with which a people can be equipped is the ability to organize and to subordinate themselves to the kind of culture upon which Power rests and which is always transmitted through the social heredity. There has been no people in the world who has possessed in a higher degree the power of subordinating themselves to the social heredity transmitted through culture than the German peoples. If it had been the fortune of those peoples to have had impressed upon them, preceding the outbreak of the war of 1914, an enlightened culture there is no goal in civilization to which they might not successfully have aspired.

The social heredity transmitted through social culture is infinitely more important to a people than any heredity inborn in the individuals thereof. It is through collective heredity that the long sequences of cause and effect upon which Power rests are imposed on the human mind in civilization. Through the organization of an ideal transmitted through this social heredity any result whatever that may be aimed at may be produced in the world. The science of heredity transmitted through culture is the science of Power upon which the attention of all who desire to change the world will be concentrated in the future. Let us turn therefore and look at some of the facts which help us to understand the first principles of this science.

For the past fifteen years I have been engaged on a series of experiments on heredity which exhibit the reach and influence of social heredity as distinct from inborn heredity in a manner which it is of the first importance to understand. The attention of science has been so exclusively directed in the past to the study of inborn heredity that as a rule no other kind of heredity has been discussed or even thought of. This has been. particularly so in the case of animals. One of the most interesting results obtained in these experiments was that the heredity of every species of wild animal upon which I experimented was found to consist of two kinds, inborn heredity and social heredity. The latter was nearly always found to be the most striking and the most import-ant in its effects.

There has been no more widely held idea in the past than that the characteristic habits of any species of wild animals which persist under all conditions are the results of heredity which is inborn in all the individuals of the species. For instance, one of the most persistent and dominant of the characteristics peculiar to wild animals is that quality, held to be inborn, which is called instinctive fear of natural enemies. Darwinians have dealt at great length with this instinct. At first sight it appears to be an obvious example of inborn heredity, developed by natural selection. For individuals which did not possess it would always tend, it was said, to be weeded out and to leave no descendants. Fear of natural enemies is one of the most powerful of the instincts existing in wild animals, and it usually appears to be so deeply registered in the physical basis of the animal's mind that it is nearly always ineradicable by training in the adult.

Now any one who is acquainted with the literature of this subject, and who recalls how Darwinians like Romanes dwell on fear of natural enemies in animals as an inborn inheritance transmitted from ancestors in whom it was developed by natural selection, will probably experience great surprise if he turns to one of the most valuable and interesting records of observation and experiment on animals published in recent years, namely, Mitchell, F.R.S., Secretary to the Zoological Society, London.

The natural enemy, which of all others probably preys on the largest number of species of animals throughout the world, and which should, there-fore, be the most universally recognized through inborn heredity, is the snake in all its varieties.

The idea that animals of nearly all kinds recognize the snake with panic and terror by inborn instinct has been one of the most widely accepted ideas in the past. It is of exceptional interest therefore to find that a large series of Dr. Chalmers Mitchell's experiments in the Zoölogical Gardens is directed to testing the existence in animals of an inborn instinct of fear for this almost universal enemy of birds and mammals in the greater part of the world.

The first fact established by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell's experiments is remarkable. His observations were concerned at the outset with the considerable number of species of animals which are usually given in the Zoological Gardens to the snakes as food, the victims being placed alive in the cages. The noteworthy fact is recorded that in the case of every one of the species of animals experimented with, there was observed, to use Dr. Chalmers Mitchell's words, "no special dread of snakes nor the slightest instinctive fear or foreknowledge of their approaching doom."

The experiments were then conducted on a wider scale, and Dr. Chalmers Mitchell continued :

Moreover, nearly every kind of mammal that we tried was indifferent to snakes. Guinea-pigs and rats would run over them; a hyrax, which is both intelligent and which from living in trees and on rocks must often encounter snakes, was hardly even interested. . . . Small carnivores, dogs, foxes, and wolves, sheep, antelopes, and deer, zebras and donkeys, were either quite indifferent or came up to the bars and sniffed and [on finding the snake was not something to eat] moved away with an air of wearied disgust.

Frogs, which form the natural food of snakes in this country, showed not the slightest trace of instinctive fear. The lower monkeys also showed no general instinctive knowledge or fear of snakes.

This is a most striking record from an observer of the experience and standing of Dr. Chalmers Mitchell. The large number and the representative character of the species experimented with will be noticed. The experiments as a whole give results which are directly in the face of previous general assumptions that is to say, in the representative species of animals above mentioned there was found no trace of any transmission from ancestors of inborn fear or recognition of such a universal natural enemy as the snake. Even the few cases mentioned by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell as forming the exception to the rule indicated have probably an explanation which goes to confirm the general result of the experiments as a whole.

Whence, therefore, comes this most powerfully developed instinct of fear of natural enemies which is undoubtedly almost universally present at an early age under certain conditions in all the individuals of wild species? I will proceed to the answer.

I turn now to my own experiments, which were conducted over a long period of time and in which care was taken to exclude disturbing influences. They are in many respects even more remarkable than those just referred to. I experimented with a number of wild species of British birds and mammals. In none of them did I find any trace in the young of an inborn, instinctive fear of the

The exceptions mentioned by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell were some of the higher monkeys and a few of the more intelligent passerine birds. These appeared to Dr. Chalmers Mitchell to show the same instinctive recognition of snakes that most human beings are said to display. As the result of my own observations in South Africa, I have the strongest doubt as to whether there is in the human child any fear of snakes which represents inborn heredity recognizing an ancestral enemy. What is however present from an earlier age in the child is simply the intelligent brain which distinguishes in the unusual appearance and movements of the snake a suggestion of exceptional power and danger. I feel sure that it is the same explanation and not inborn heredity recognizing an ancestral enemy which applies to the behaviour of the more intelligent passerine birds and the higher monkeys as mentioned by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell.

Natural enemies which were regarded with fear and terror by the adult of the species. Young wild hares and young wild rabbits showed no inborn fear of either dogs or cats. Young wild rabbits and young wild hares became as friendly and playful from the beginning with specially trained cats to which they were introduced as if they had been all of the same species. Young rabbits, showing no inborn fear of dogs, would frisk and play with the hereditary enemy of their kind by whom their species had been hunted for tens of thousands of generations. The young of our common wild birds showed no inborn fear of the cat when, fully fledged, they were under proper conditions introduced to it for the first time. Nor did they develop any fear afterwards. And so also when they were introduced under similar conditions to birds of prey like the hawk or the carrion crow trained to friendly relations.

If it be asked now whence comes the universal and ineradicable fear of natural enemies, which is present under natural conditions in the whole of the adult members of the species in these cases, the answer is of great interest. The conclusion which I arrived at was that in the numerous typical wild species experimented upon the whole of this powerful influence, representing a most dominant and ineradicable habit of animal nature, was entirely the result of social heredity imposed on the young of each generation by training and example and nearly always under conditions of strong emotion.

As the experiments were extended it was found, also in the face of generally accepted ideas, that in many cases deep-seated habits of species, extending even to such fundamental matters as the nature of their food and the usual manner of living, were not matters of inborn heredity but were acquired as part of the social inheritance which the adults of the species imposed by example and training on the young of each generation. Once acquired the habits were as fixed and unchangeable as those which are the result of inborn heredity. But it was found that a different habit, proving equally unchangeable once acquired, could be imposed in the beginning in the same way.

It has been already pointed out that the distinctive characteristic of social heredity, as contrasted with inborn heredity, is that the elements of social heredity can be completely changed and different elements imposed in a short time. It became evident in these experiments that, if control could be obtained of the social heredity of a species, many of its apparently ingrained and fixed habits could be entirely changed in a single generation.

The case of a wild species of New Zealand parrot which, although previously vegetarian, acquired after the introduction of European sheep the habit of feeding on the kidney fat of these animals, causing the death of the sheep which it attacked, is often quoted as an extraordinary example in nature of a sudden change in the fundamental habit of life in a wild species. But there can be no doubt that sudden changes equally deep-seated in the habits of a whole species could be effected at will by obtaining control of its social heredity.

Many of the experiments gave the strongest indications in this direction. There is no more established vegetarian British bird than our common wood pigeon. In one of my experiments. with the young of this species a young bird was brought up with a carrion crow and a hawk which were fed on raw meat. The young pigeon by example was led to feed on the same food, and throve on the exclusively meat diet. So fixed did the habit thus acquired by social heredity become that when the adult pigeon at a later stage was offered the grains which formed the natural diet of its species it did not recognize them as food.

The common wild hare never makes a burrow in its natural state. But when a young wild hare was brought up with rabbits, which did not show it the hostility which is usual between the species, the young hare acquired from its companions the habit of burrowing and would cast the earth excavated with forepaws backwards between its hind legs exactly in the manner of a rabbit.

When there was any physiological insufficiency in the organs of an animal to prevent it from acquiring or maintaining the habit usually imposed by social heredity, results of this kind did not follow. It was found, for instance, that a diet of grains could not be imposed by any effect of example on meat-eating birds. But the striking fact which has to be emphasized is that, where no natural physiological insufficiency existed, the most unexpected habits could easily be imposed on young animals by example and training. And further, the habits so imposed were found to be transmitted again to the next generation through ordinary social heredity.

Some grasp of the manner in which the elements of social heredity are imposed on the young under conditions of the strongest emotion, and some perception of the extraordinary reach and strength of the habits thus imposed, may be obtained from the study of an example which exhibits the facts clearly in relation to their bearing upon the subject of social heredity in human society.

One of the species of wild animals with which a considerable series of my experiments was concerned was the wild duck. There is probably no creature which has been more universally hunted by man from primeval times than the wild duck. The adult bird is one of the shyest of creatures. In alertness and craftiness in her nesting habits, in the tricks and stratagems for avoiding pursuit which both the parent and the young have developed, this ancestor of our breed of domestic ducks has few equals in the wild. It breeds plentifully in remote places, usually near water, throughout northern Europe, and in all my experiments eggs or newly hatched young were taken from the nests of the wild birds in their native haunts. In all the experiments I found no evidence that some of the most characteristic habits of the wild duck were the result of inborn heredity developed by natural selection. On the contrary, the experiments furnished evidence from which it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the habits were transmitted by social inheritance imposed on the young mainly under conditions of strong emotion.

The record of a single example will exhibit the meaning that was found to be inherent in a great number of experiments. I came on a nest of the wild duck in a marsh as the young birds had just emerged from the eggs. The mother duck flew off and disappeared in the sedge, flapping a wing to which she pretended injury. I stood by the nest for some hours and watched the young birds. The greater number were already active and displaying an interest in their surroundings. They began to try to get out of the nest, and I took them one by one in my hand and placed them in the water, where in the stillness that reigned they splashed and twittered and enjoyed themselves. They showed not the slightest fear of me, nestling from time to time on my feet, and turning intelligent eyes upwards to look at me, evidently quite ready to accept me in the fullest confidence as their guardian.

The wild duck had been in these marshes for untold ages. She had been here even in the days when the woolly rhinoceros left its remains with those of the cavemen in the adjacent hills. During all this time her kind had been one of the most universally hunted among wild creatures. The spent cartridges of the modern sportsmen strewed the bog around. Yet here were her offspring just entering on the world and showing no sign of any kind of any inborn fear of this the hereditary enemy of the species.

After a time I moved away some distance to watch what would happen. The mother bird returned and alighted near by. The little ducks rushed towards her as she called. I could observe her. She was chattering with emotion. Every feather was quivering with excitement. The Great Terror of Man was upon her. After a short interval I advanced towards the group again. The mother bird flew away with a series of loud warning quacks. The little ones scattered to cover, flapping their short wing stumps and with beaks wide open cheeping in terror. With difficulty I found one of them again in hiding. It was now a wild, transformed creature trembling in panic which could not be subdued.

It is in this way, and under conditions of the strongest emotion, that the accumulated experience of tens of thousands of generations of the species is imposed on young birds. Once having received it, within a few days, even within a few hours, they pass into another world from which they can never be reclaimed. In the numerous experiments with wild ducks which I made, the following conclusions stood out without any exception. The little ducks, hatched out from the eggs taken from the nest, or taken themselves from the nest the first day after hatching, knew nothing of any fear of man, and they never acquired it afterwards if brought up with domestic birds. 1 But when once the Terror had been transmitted to them through the social heredity of their species they could not afterwards be tamed. When brought up by a foster-parent the young wild ducks acquired that exact relationship of friendliness to man which the foster-parent displayed and which differed considerably according to the birds used as foster-parents.

I have found from observations in many countries and in different animals that it is in the same way that the exact distance up to which wild animals will allow man to approach them is always imposed on the young through social heredity. It represents the accumulated experience of the species in the past. The manner in which the inheritance is imposed on the young in every generation may be watched even in the streets of London in the case of the common sparrow. When the young sparrows leave the nest they are comparatively tame. But they are watched on the ground assiduously by the parents, and when an enemy like man approaches to within a certain distance, the cock parent utters a loud shrill note expressing strong emotion which causes the young birds instantly to take flight. The exact distance to which man is allowed to approach is the danger limit fixed by the long accumulated experience of the species, which is thus transmitted to the young and which is fixed in them ineradicably under conditions of emotion. But when a group of tamed birds is isolated and the social heredity is thus changed, it is found that the altered inheritance is similarly transmitted to future generations.

The supreme interest of the foregoing facts is not in their relation to any of the problems of animal life. Their great importance lies in the application which they bear to the highest and most vital problems of human society. When we remember how few and unimportant are the examples of the social state among the higher animals below man, the unexpected magnitude of the part played by social heredity even in such conditions has great significance. If social heredity thus transmitted anew to the young in every generation is the agency through which there may be imposed and fixed on whole species possessing no distinctive social habits some of the most characteristic qualities of these species, and if these qualities ineradicable in the individual can nevertheless be entirely replaced in another generation by quite different qualities, similarly imposed by social heredity, what then must be the unimagined importance of social heredity in a creature like man whose almost unlimited power on the horizon before him in civilization rests exclusively on the potentiality of mind in the social state?

As the observations on social heredity begun with animals were carried into human society, the first fact encountered was very remarkable. Notwithstanding the supreme importance of social heredity in the evolution of civilization, there has not been in the past any wide or systematic study of it conducted on modern scientific lines. Nearly all the research work on the subject of heredity in human society that has been done in the past consists of experiments, observations, and discussions concerned almost exclusively with the relatively less important subject of inborn heredity.

In much of this work also, as in a considerable proportion of Galton's observations and in the studies of many writers in criminology, the subject of inborn heredity and of social heredity is almost inextricably confused.

My own studies of social heredity were undertaken with the definite object of endeavouring to distinguish, as in animals, between the effects of inborn heredity and the effects of social heredity. They were conducted in various parts of the world amongst aboriginal races, ruling races, aristocracies, subject peoples, and slave peoples. They were extended to various grades and classes of society in the United Kingdom, to boys embraced in the Boy Scout movement, and to children at schools and public institutions. In all the studies I was concerned primarily with the subject of collective heredity in its relation to Power in civilization.

I will not discuss at length here the first conclusion to which researches of this kind are bound to carry the observer at an early stage. I have referred to it with some emphasis elsewhere.1 In the face of the evidence which is to hand on all sides it is impossible to avoid being convinced that none of the leading races or nationalities which have ruled in the past or which wield power on a large scale over other peoples in the present have done so, or do so now, because of any distinctive superior intellectual faculties inborn in the ruling race. The ideas on this subject which prevailed a few generations ago will not survive the test of being brought into contact with facts.

Turning first to aboriginal races, Galton's hasty generalizations about what he conceived to be the greatly inferior mentality of aboriginal races like the Damaras have become, when submitted to examination in the light of facts, no more than nonsense. In nearly all the British colonies where aboriginal children of various races are educated in elementary schools under the same conditions as European children it is in evidence in the published State records that the former learn just as easily and readily as European children, and are capable of showing equally good examination results. The same is true of the negro children in the public elementary schools of the United States.

Coming to higher education and to the results displayed in conditions where students of European races are trained and educated for the higher activities of the world, side by side with representatives of almost all the leading peoples outside Europe, the facts are equally noteworthy.

At many centres of university and higher education in England, and at a large number of centres of learning and higher training on the continent of Europe, students of Indian, Japanese, Burmese, Siamese, Chinese, Negro, and many other races are to be found undergoing preparation for the higher professions and for the superior work of the world under exactly the same conditions as students of European races. The results go to show that non-European students quite hold their own in intellectual achievements in comparison with European students. When every allowance is made for the fact that the non-European students are often selected representatives of large numbers, there remains nevertheless no evidence to which weight can be given tending to establish the existence of any inborn quality of superior intellect in the students of European races. More than once in my inquiries experienced and competent observers, familiar with the capacities of students of various races in University or Bar examinations in England, have expressed to me the opinion that it would be impossible to make out a serious case for accepting the existence of any inborn intellectual superiority in the English students, and that if such an opinion were urged the case would be quite as strong for holding the opposite view.

Confining attention to the peoples who have played a ruling part in the history of the Western world in the past, it would in the same manner be impossible to make out a case for inborn intellectual pre-eminence in any one of them over other European races. In the face of world-wide evidence it would be entirely foolish to attempt to maintain that the Teutonic peoples possessed inborn intellectual superiority over the Celts, or the Celts over the Slays, or the Slays in turn over the Teutons. It would be equally absurd in face of the evidence to maintain that any European people possessed inborn intellectual superiority over the Jews.

Facts of the same significance are encountered if the scrutiny is restricted to the different races which combine to make up any of the political aggregates that have played a great part in the development of Europe. The Saxon and Norman peoples have probably, on the whole, performed a larger practical part in the development of Great Britain and of the British Empire than the Celtic peoples with whom they have been so closely associated in history. But so far as there are any grounds for estimating separately the achievement of the different races in Great Britain, it would represent a claim in face of the facts of history to assert that there is proof of any superior intellectual faculty inborn in peoples of Saxon or Norman descent in comparison with peoples of Celtic descent.

Conditions of the same kind are encountered amongst the races who make up the peoples of Germany. In modern Germany it is often pointed out by Germans themselves that notwithstanding the ruling part played by Prussia in the evolution of the modern German Empire the intellectual part of the work has not rested to any corresponding degree with natives of Prussia. The two men who more than any others created the intellectual ethos in which the deeds of modern Prussia became possible were Treitschke and Nietzsche, neither of whom was Prussian in descent. A very large proportion of the thinkers and leaders of Prussia have not been Prussians. It is curious to note, remarks a recent writer, 1 " that the majority of Prussian figures that have held the Western imagination have not been Prussian by birth, and have seldom been even Germanic in origin."

In none of the dominant peoples of the world to-day, and in none of the ruling races which have been prominent in history in the past, is the basis of power to be found in inborn intellectual superiority over the peoples ruled. What, there-fore, is the basis of Power in human history?

The answer to this question carries us very far. In arriving at it, the belief, which prevailed in the popular mind throughout the West until recently, as to the inborn nature of the causes establishing superiority in races, and the prepossessions as to the controlling importance of inborn heredity in ruling races and ruling peoples of the kind which have come down to us in England through Galton in science and through Freeman in the teaching of history, will have to be abandoned. There can be no doubt that the first essential in the constitution of Power in all the forms through which Power expresses itself in the history of races and of peoples lies in the elements of their social heredity. The character of a people is formed by the nature of its social heredity. It is the nature of its social heredity which creates a ruling people. It is what it lacks in its social heredity that relegates a people to the position of an inferior race.

In the national and racial inheritance of a people the influence of the elements of its social heredity insensibly envelops and saturates the entire collective mind. Imposed on the young at an early age and under conditions of emotion the effects of inheritance thus transmitted exceed and outlast those of every other influence in life. It was with well-founded instinct that William II of Germany on his accession turned to the elementary school teachers of his country when he aimed to impose the elements of a new social heredity on the whole German people. The result was the concentration of mind and the extraordinary collective strength with which Germany went into the world war in 1914.

The higher end was missed by William II. But it remains in full view of the world. Civilization is absolutely invincible once it realizes the secret of its own unity. The main cause of those deep dividing differences which separate peoples and nationalities and classes from each other and which prevent or stultify collective effort in all its most powerful forms lies exclusively in the nature of the social heredity which is imposed on the young. In a generation they could all be swept away if civilization put before itself the will to impose on the young the ideal of subordination to the common aims of organized humanity.

The influence of a collective ideal imposed on the mind of the young under conditions of emotion is incalculable. It is the only cause capable of bringing into action the deepest strength of which human nature is capable. Every individual in the mass is continuously driven by it to endeavour to lift himself to the level of his inner ideal social self exactly in the manner described by William James in his Textbook of Psychology.' but driven now towards a collective instead of towards an individual end. The influence affects all the processes of mind. It colours and directs in after-life the conclusions of the thinker so that these are in reality predetermined in him by the emotion of an ideal imposed on him at an earlier stage. The influence reaches to the uttermost workings of mind, so that in the development of abstract systems of thought the main problem which has continually beset the mind of the philosopher in history is simply, as Leslie Stephen has described it, "how conclusions which are agreeable to his emotions can be connected with postulates which are congenial to his intellect."

In nations the inheritance transmitted in social heredity may be very complex. Geographical, economic, and material causes of many kinds may contribute important factors to it. But the essential element of Power in all social heredity is the emotion of the ideal. Once effectively imposed, this idealism becomes the expression of the living soul of a people. Its influence can-not be estimated. It subordinates everything. It becomes Power incarnate. There is no object which a people or a race can set before itself which is not possible of attainment through the organization and the transmission of an ideal in its social heredity. In the days when modern Germany was on the anvil the chief conception underlying all the lectures of the teacher who above all others expressed the soul of Germany was that which drew the rising generation of young German students to Treitschke. It was expressed in the saying that the most precious natural possession that a people can hold is its idealism,' and in the sustained assertion that any aim that a living people aspires to that aim it will infallibly attain.'

It was in this way that Japan achieved the greatest miracle in modern civilization by re-creating herself, and in a few decades transforming herself into a surprising vehicle of Power. It was in this manner that modern Germany astonished humanity by transforming herself within two generations into a potentiality for good or evil which eclipsed that of ancient Rome. Only through the character of her idealism did Germany fail to reach the world goal at which she aimed. The leaders who imposed the mechanism of Power on her missed the chief knowledge of the law of Power in civilization, namely, that the winning type of Power rests on the principles which sub-ordinate us to the universal. If her leaders had grasped this central fact of human evolution there is no dream that the German peoples had dreamed that Germany would not have realized in the modern world.

The will to attain to an end imposed on a people by the emotion of an ideal organized and transmitted through social heredity is the highest capacity of mind. It can only be imposed in all its strength through the young. So to impose it has become the chief end of education in the future.

Oh, you blind leaders who seek to convert the world by laboured disputations ! Step out of the way or the world must fling you aside. Give us the Young. Give us the Young and we will create a new mind and a new earth in a single generation.

The idealism which will win out in the stress of the world is that through which Power must obtain the completest expression. Power in its highest expression is the science of organizing the individual mind in the service of the universal. Truth is nothing else than this science of Power. This is the test by which every religion will have to stand or fall.