d or for evil? And
the same applies to our natural surroundings also. And here I must
invoke the patience of my readers, if I try to explain in as few words
as possible what I think about _environment_, and what about
_heredity_ or _atavism_.

I was a thorough Darwinian in ascribing the shaping of my career to
environment, though I was always very averse to atavism, of which we
have heard so much lately in most biographies. Even with respect to
environment, however, I could not go quite so far as certain of our
Darwinian friends, who maintain that everything is the result of
environment, or translated into biographical language, that everybody
is a creature of circumstances. No, I could not go so far as that.
Environment may shape our course and may shape us, but there must be
something that is shaped, and allows itself to be shaped. I was once
seriously asked by one who considers himself a Darwinian whether I did
not know that the Mammoth was driven by the extreme cold of the
Pleiocene Period to grow a thick fur in his struggle for life. That he
grew then a thicker fur, I knew, but that surely does not explain the
whole of the Mammoth, with and without a thick fur, before and after
the fur. It is really a pity to see for how many of these downright
absurdities Darwin is made responsible by the Darwinians. He has
clearly shown how in many cases the individual may be modified almost
beyond recognition by environment, but the individual must always have
been there first. Before we had a spaniel and a Newfoundland dog there
must have been some kind of dog, neither so small as the spaniel nor
so large as the Newfoundland, and no one would now doubt that these
two belonged to the same species and presupposed some kind of a less
modified canine creature. It is equally true that every individual man
has been modified by his surroundings or environment, if not to the
same extent as certain animals, yet very considerably, as in the case
of Kaspar Hauser, the man with the iron mask, or the mutineers of the
_Bounty_ in the Pitcairn Islands. But there must have been the man
first, before he could be so modified. Now it was this very
individual, my own self in fact, the spiritual self even more than the
physical, that interested my critics, while I thought that the
circumstances which moulded that self would be of far greater interest
than the self itself. Of course all the modifications that men now
undergo are nothing if compared