stics and instincts impressed upon it during the pre-natal
period. Whether anything like this ever happened, or was possible,
mattered little: it enabled me, at any rate, to suggest the limitations
of human responsibility in a simple and effective way.

The story which follows comes more nearly within the range of common
experience. The successive development of inherited bodily aspects and
habitudes is well known to all who have lived long enough to see families
grow up under their own eyes. The same thing happens, but less obviously
to common observation, in the mental and moral nature. There is something
frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but
particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to
generation. Jonathan Edwards the younger tells the story of a brutal
wretch in New Haven who was abusing his father, when the old man cried
out, "Don't drag me any further, for I did n't drag my father beyond this
tree." [The original version of this often-repeated story may be found
in Aristotle's Ethics, Book 7th, Chapter 7th.] I have attempted to show
the successive evolution of some inherited qualities in the character of
Myrtle Hazard, not so obtrusively as to disturb the narrative, but
plainly enough to be kept in sight by the small class of preface-readers.

If I called these two stories Studies of the Reflex Function in its
higher sphere, I should frighten away all but the professors and the
learned ladies. If I should proclaim that they were protests against the
scholastic tendency to shift the total responsibility of all human action
from the Infinite to the finite, I might alarm the jealousy of the
cabinet-keepers of our doctrinal museums. By saying nothing about it,
the large majority of those whom my book reaches, not being
preface-readers, will never suspect anything to harm them beyond the
simple facts of the narrative.

Should any professional alarmist choose to confound the doctrine of
limited responsibility with that which denies the existence of any
self-determining power, he may be presumed to belong to the class of
intellectual half-breeds, of which we have many representatives in our
new country, wearing the garb of civilization, and even the gown of
scholarship. If we cannot follow the automatic machinery of nature into
the mental and moral world, where it plays its part as much as in the
bodily functions, without being accused of laying "all that we