bringing gifts unto his treasury of ethical motive, sanction, inspiration, but except in George Eliot's Romola, which, by the way, is nothing more than the same laws that we have been considering written large in the imagination's golden light, I do not know of any moral teaching more impressive than that which I have found in the psychology of habit, as set forth by the masters in this kind, and especially by Professor James. When we used to foregather in Divinity Hall some thirty years ago, I little thought that I should ever owe to him so large a debt. "Let no youth," he says, "have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. But there is thunder upon this horizon

as well

as rosy light. Its long reverberations tell us that by these habits of ours which we are tolerating or making, "we are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time.' Well, he may not count it and mankind may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve cells and fibers the molecules are counting it, registering it and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes." "Everything has two handles," says an ancient proverb; "beware of the wrong one. The wrong one here means such self-wounding that the life-blood ebbs away. The right one means a sword to hew all hateful opposition down and bring us to our own. If a good deal of this seems to you very much like preaching, again I furnish in my own preaching an illustration of the laws with which I deal. The habit of preaching is one of the most inexpugnable and irresistible of all habits. When Coleridge asked Lamb, "Charles, did you ever hear me preach?" the stammering humorist made answer, as you know, "I n-never h-heard you d-do anything else, Sam."

The great controversy between Spencer and Weismann as to the inheritance of acquired traits has evidently an important bearing on the doctrine of habit. The difference between them is that while Spencer thinks that we inherit from preceding generations the capital of their character with the accumulated interest of habit, Weismann contends that the accumulated interest is not inherited. The argument in favor of Weismann from the non-inheritance of malformations and abridgments of parts and functions may be conceded to him for what it is worth. There is a variation of Mother Goose's three blind mice who all ran after the farmer's wife; a continuation of that tailless tale which is, upon this head, "significant of much." The experimenter took twelve white mice, five males and seven females, and having cut off their tails, began breeding with them in Oct., 1887. By January, 1889, there were three hundred and thirty-three, and a little later nine hundred and one, and there was not one that showed the least shortening of the tails, though the tails of each successive generation had been lopped in turn.* But the inheritance of mechanical injury is one thing and that of acquired habit is quite another. Mr. Spencer is perfectly willing to allow that the discouragement of the little toe by boot-pressure has nothing to do with the increasing insignificance of that part. Signs of its progressive degradation are found in barefoot tribes. But he is not convinced that its disuse, sympathetic with the change from climbing to walking habits, would not in some hundred thousand years have caused the degeneracy of which we are aware. But it is a far cry from these considerations to the doctrine of Weismann that the germ-plasm of successive generations leads a life of absolute seclusion and independence, i. e., that general bodily conditions have no influence whatever on the development of the prenatal life. It may be conceded that a great deal has been passed to the credit of heredity which has come another way. Weismann no less than Galton believes in hereditary genius. What he does not believe in is hereditary talent, i. e., the inheritance of any special ability. His *The failure of three thousand years of circumcision to leave any inherited trace might, it would seem, have rendered this experiment unnecessary.

argument on this head is full of interest, and it is most persuasive and convincing to my personal mind. A man is not born a physicist or a botanist, however great a physicist or botanist his father may have been before him. How, then, do we account for a line of musicians, or botanists, or artists in one family? By the force of the environment and example. "A great artist (or thinker) is always a great man, and if he finds his talent closed on one side, he forces his way through on the other." We may allow all this, and still we are far away from Wesimann's doctrine of the complete isolation of the germ-plasm, its complete independence on the general bodily character. There are many facts which do not look this way, resemblances of the offspring of a second union to a previous sire. The conflict of domestic with wild instincts in domestic animals is quite unaccountable if acquired habits cannot be transmitted. If, as Darwin believed, the families of drunkards become extinct in the fourth generation, something very different from the seclusion of the germinal life from all general bodily conditions has got to be supposed. Hereditary senility is not uncommon. It is a striking fact that nearly fifty-three per cent of all murderers, according to certain careful tables, were begotten by fathers who had reached the period of decadence. That early marriages are those which produce health, strength, power, genius in the offspring is a conviction fortified by many illustrations, with Michael Angelo and Goethe and their fine girl-mothers marching in the van.

But indeed the original vigorous and rigorous statement of Weismann's doctrine has received quite as many notches from his own grinding and regrinding as from any blows of his opponents in the lively fray. As gradually modified by himself, his doctrine now bears a very close resemblance to that of Galton, which involves the exertion of a certain amount of influence on the germ-substance by the general substance of the body, and consequently the possible transmission of acquired habits, traits, and talents in some very slight degree. That the transmission of such habits, traits and talents, is much less general and important than Spencer has conceived, would seem to be the outcome of the

long discussion up to the present time. But even supposing that Weismann had made good his original contention that the material of heredity is absolutely stable and continuous-our doctrine of habit would not be cast down and utterly destroyed. We should have to look to natural selection alone instead of to that and the transmission of acquired habits, traits, and talents, as the secret of development. We should have to reform our grandparents and the earlier generations to improve our progeny. A clean sweep would be made of all those lovely sentimental notions as to the habits and environment of the mother on the life she nourishes within her own. The books she read, the pictures and the natural scenes delighting her, the lofty thoughts she cherished, would be of no account as influencing the unborn child. Even as it is, these things are evidently gone. But do parental habits therefore cease to be a matter of importance? Evidently not. Weismann has ventured no such heresy. Rather has he given to the force of habit a more important character than it had before. According to his doctrine, it is the child's association with the habits of its parents that gives that direction to his faculty or genius which we call talent. He negatives the influence of hereditary habit, but he makes the influence of personal and associated habit a factor of immense importance. Buckle, who did not believe in hereditary character or talent, would have rejoiced to see his day. There is abounding comfort in his thought for those who have in charge the education of children and the reform of criminals. For given the doctrine of Spencer in full force, and the dead weight of heredity is depressing to the last degree. The modifications of Weismann give the matter more completely into our own hands. At least they deepen our responsibility, and if they do not take off the curse for our shortcomings from our immediate ancestors altogether, they distribute it over a much wider field. In losing the transmission of parental habits, traits, and talents, we lose much less than we have generally imagined. It is true that before the birth of children from a normal marriage the personal habits of the parents are generally fixed, but those deeper habits of thought and action which make the full-grown charac

ter are not. But it is not as if human parents were like so many of the insect world, and like the mother of Aurora Leigh, who "could not bear the joy of giving life; the mother's rapture slew her." We generally live on, and if our children have not inherited our habits, traits, and talents, they will fast enough contract them from association with our own, or in their plastic substance receive the impress of our moulding hands. Henceforth the mother's occupation is not gone. Not only while her child is yet unborn, but through many years before she has conceived the blessed hope, and through many years after its fulfillment nothing that she can do to store her mind with lovely images and noble thoughts will come amiss, nothing that she can do to make the habits of her life as calm and sweet as she can make them with assiduous and loving care. And what is true of the mother is not less true of the father. In despite of Weismann's doctrine, they can still say to their children present and future, For their sakes we consecrate ourselves. For what they are is the most potent influence under heaven in determining what their children shall become.

The application of these principles to the social structure is perfectly obvious. Mr. Benjamin Kidd, the writer of a recent book called Social Evolution, which sides with Weismann in a somewhat reckless manner, has some very interesting pages on the comparative values of the savage and the cultivated brain. He finds the difference so little that it does not suggest much accumulation of intellectual ability either by hereditary transmission or natural selection. And what, then, makes the difference between the savage and the civilized man? Answer: The accumulation of social advantages by infinitesimal increments from generation to generation and from age to age. There is inheritance, but the wealth which we inherit is hoarded not in the convolutions of the brain, but in the continuous tradition of the arts and habits of the race. The inheritance is along the social, not along the physiological and cerebral lines. There seems to be much truth in this. But why, then, does the savage remain savage? Because he has not broken that "cake of custom," as Mr. Bagehot called it, that bond of early habit which is a