Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/697

No. 6.] intelligent persons,—a unity of perfect understanding; and the degree of understanding determines the intimacy.

The problem of heredity is the central one of modern biology. Although it is generally agreed to bring all organic phenomena under the law of evolution, there is a great difference of opinion as to what evolution means. There are many theories of evolution, due principally to the various methods of stating and solving the problem of heredity. The question of heredity is not a question of pure biology, but involves anthropological and sociological issues. For this reason, it is very complicated and difficult to approach with true scientific impartiality. There is a strong tendency to be content with a state of doubt regarding the subject because of a fear that a definite solution might prove to be in conflict with certain desires, interests, or moral principles. The various theories of heredity may be classified into two groups—those which hold that acquired characters are, and those which hold that they are not, transmissible by heredity. If we lay aside all prejudice in the matter and study the opposed camps from the standpoint of pure theory, we discover that the difference is due largely to a series of misunderstandings. In the first place, the neo-Lamarckians and the neo-Darwinians do not mean the same thing by the notion of heredity. Both emphasize the fact of heredity, but the former is interested in it from the point of view of the changing species, the latter, from the point of view of the static or persistent species. The question of the former was, How does the species evolve and transform itself? The question of the latter was, How does the species preserve and maintain itself? In the second place, the two schools differ in their notion of what constitutes an acquired character. A third misunderstanding arises from the different rôle and importance which the two schools attribute to environment in the history of living organisms. The neo-Lamarckians claim that the function creates the organ. Their opponents, admitting active adaptation, claim that the new character was always latent in the ancestral organism. If heredity means a 'general quality of the living world' it excludes the possibility of acquiring specifically new characters. Acquired and innate refer to the same phenomenon from two different points of view. Neo-Darwinism may be said to conform more closely to the logic of the facts than does the opposite theory.

(This is the annual address to the Moral Education League in London). There are two great sources of indifference or opposition to the introduction of moral instruction into the school. These are a misapprehension as to what is meant by moral education and as to the methods advocated for imparting it, and the failure clearly to understand its relation to religious education.