Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/509

Rh (Saxe-Coburg, etc.) even in the earliest times here traced, we find practically no such variation in characters. They also would have to explain why in Spain and Italy in the nineteenth century, we also find a variation in moral characters exactly like that found in Russia in the early eighteenth or in Spain in the sixteenth centuries.

Another aspect of the question, that is more in line with heredity than environment, is the fact that variations among the children are always duplicated by corresponding variations in the ancestry. This is equally true of both mental and moral and indeed facial characteristics. Children born of the same parents and reared in the same court must usually have pretty nearly the same surroundings, yet instead of their being molded to any standard type, we find that when the blood is diverse in character, just about the proper proportion of children show these same peculiarities both for good and bad. It is only when the blood is uniformly good as in the families of Brunswick, Saxe-Coburg and Sallefeld that we find unanimity in the morality of the descendants.

So that heredity appears to the writer to have exercised in mental life a factor not far from nine tenths, while from the moral side it is something over one half. As to anything in the nature of 'soul' or 'free-will' in the sense of a motive power lying outside of natural laws, such evidence can not, of course, exclude its existence. It does, however, show that such a power, if it exists at all, has only a very minor influence, and even the arch argument of theology, the heroic soul who tries and tries again, is found to be but the reduplication of another. So it appears that the three possible factors in mental and moral life are to be expressed in the following order: Heredity, Environment, and finally, printed with the same old question mark. Free-will.