Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/785

Rh acquired by the slow processes of evolution to appreciate the preponderating influence of heredity in the manifestation of will-power and kindred phenomena. Two individuals may start in life apparently with equal chances and hindrances. One succeeds, the other fails; one is only stimulated by obstacles, the other is disheartened and conquered by them; one has inherent possibilities in his nature that are utterly absent in the other. The mysterious potentialities of different natures are often more easy of recognition than of explanation. There are many peculiar and diverse ways in which the action of the moral nature is exhibited, according to its development, in human affairs. Thus some men display most exemplary conduct in certain relations of family and society, but show an utter absence of the moral sense in dealing with competitors.

There are, unfortunately, at the present time, too many object-lessons exemplifying a strangely irregular moral development. Men who calmly exhibit the greatest depravity in pushing schemes for their own interest, recklessly bribing officials and buying legislators, may yet show apparently the record of a most proper private life. A man who wrecks a bank, thereby spreading distress and ruin wide-spread, is found to be the kindest of fathers. The evil done by forcing a corner in the market that will put some of the necessaries of life beyond the reach of the needy multitude, can not be compensated for by subscribing to a charity. Railroad-wrecking and dishonest speculation form an incongruous mixture with benevolence. Qualities that are subversive of all civic virtues and tend to the very disintegration of society, appear to flourish by the side of a sort of goodness, finding expression, perhaps, in one or two directions.

The faculty of the mind, as well as the organ of the body, that is used the most, undergoes the highest development and works with preponderating efficiency. If there is an absence of a properly regulated human and moral feeling to hold a check on such excessive keenness, the results are unfortunate. The over-development of acquisitiveness and the under-development of certain moral faculties, have enabled individuals to distance competitors and crowd better men to the wall. Some men may have too high a sense of honor to compete successfully with others not so endowed. Doubtless, many of the shiftless and lazy like to consider that they are too honest to succeed. But often this is true of better men. Intense selfishness is too exclusively the mainspring of endeavor in our modern civilization. While the inferior development of physical and mental functions keeps a large proportion of mankind in unequal subjugation to the minority, the under-development of certain parts of the moral nature is actually an aid to worldly success. This is a pregnant thought, and shows how the development theory can throw side-lights on all angles of a social question.

There is, then, a direct relation between an individual's heredity and