child's environment exists to be used, and as he grows up he more and more acquires the power of reacting upon it. Whether he makes a good or bad use of it depends ultimately on him alone. Parent or teacher or friend may point out how it should be used, what elements in it should be assimilated, and what avoided, but in the end the responsibility for choosing the right or the wrong rests with the individual himself. It is the privilege and prerogative of man to be, so far as his character is concerned, a creature of his own making.
But, it may be objected, if no acquired characters are transmitted, if all that we gain in toil and pain during our lives is doomed to perish with us, is not our responsibility a purely personal and private matter? Our mental and moral acquisitions, it may be argued, have no significance for the race, because they cannot be transmitted to our offspring. Does this not remove the chief incentive to responsibility? No, it does not; and that for three reasons.
(1) With the denial of the transmission of acquired characters our sense of our personal responsibility for our actions is increased. We cannot blame a previous generation for our shortcomings. In the physical realm, indeed, the results of vice may be perpetuated; but the child of the most dissolute parents may acquire moral strength. So far as morality goes, every child starts life with a clean, or almost clean, slate. Proclivities to good and evil it does indeed inherit; and it is one of the great privileges of the educator to be always on the look-out for proclivities to encourage, or to restrain. But these are merely tendencies. In
