In considering these questions as to characteristic qualities or want of qualities in groups and classes of human communities, we see then that we have in the first instance to distinguish very broadly between the body or structure of the individual, and the “stirps” or germ of the race which he carries within him. The former may be vastly changed for the better or worse as compared with average individuals, without affecting in any way the latter. The germ is carried by the individual member of the race in an almost complete state of isolation or safety from the influences which affect the individual’s structure generally (his body as distinct from his germinal or reproductive substance) injuriously or beneficially. The germ varies also, but independently. That is a matter of primary importance. Equally important in the case of man is a peculiarity which affects his manifestation of qualities in a way unknown in any other living thing.
Human society, in more marked and dominating form, in proportion as it is what we call “civilised,” has created for itself an inheritance which is not dependent on the variations of strains and the laws of actual breeding. Over and above--very much above--what each man inherits in the form of qualities and characteristics of his special family and stock--is the enormous mass of accumulated experience, knowledge, tradition, custom, and law--which pervades and envelops, as it were, the mere physical generations of this or that pullulating crowd of human individuals. Tradition, at first conveyed by gesture and imitativeness from parents to offspring, then by word of mouth, then by writing, and finally by printed record, sanctioned and enforced by all kinds of persuasion and compulsion--has culminated in an educative discipline which affects every individual in the community in the most powerful way--and constitutes an inheritance of a significance and activity altogether transcending, and independent of that due to the physical transmission of bodily and mental qualities. Public opinion, law, knowledge, belief, custom, and habit exist, and pursue their own course of change, as it were, outside the successive bodily generations of a population. Yet they determine in very large measure the characteristics which each class, and the community as a whole, exhibit. We have to distinguish those results which are due to physical heredity, similar in man and in animals--from results due to this all-powerful education peculiar to man--education, which for civilised man proceeds from almost innumerable sources--from parents, nurses, playfellows, companions, social, professional, and political organisations, as well as from the professed teacher, and from the local peculiarities of the simplest conditions of life. Hence it is that man inherits very little in the way of ready-made instincts, tricks of his nervous mechanism--but, on the contrary, has an enormously long period of individual growth and education, and inherits “educability” to a degree which varies in every family and race.