or that any career
like that of my father, grandfather, and other members of my family
would ever be open to me, never entered my mind then. It seemed to me
almost disloyal to think of ever taking their places. Even when I saw
that there were no longer any Protestant monks, no Benedictines, the
place of an assistant in a large library, sitting in a quiet corner,
was my highest ambition.

I do not see why it should have been so, for all my relations and
friends occupied high places in the public service, but as I had no
father to open my eyes, and to stimulate my ambition--he having died
before I was four years old--my ideas of life and its possibilities
were evidently taken from my young widowed mother, whose one desire
was to be left alone, much as the world tempted her, then not yet
thirty years old, to give up her mourning and to return to society.
Thus it soon became my own philosophy of life, to be left alone, free
to go my own way, or like Diogenes, to live in my own tub. Here we see
what I call the influence of circumstances, of surroundings, or as
others call it, of environment. This, however, is very different from
atavism, as we shall see presently. Atavism also has been called a
kind of environment, attacking us and influencing us from the past,
and as it were, from behind, from the North in fact instead of the
South, the East, and the West, and from all the points of the compass.

But atavism means really a very different thing, if indeed it means
anything at all.

I must ease my conscience once for all on this point, and say what I
feel about atavism and environment. Environment in the shape of
friends, of locality, and other material circumstances, has certainly
influenced my life very much, and I could never see why such a hybrid
word as environment should be used instead of surroundings or
circumstances. Creatures of circumstances would be far better
understood than creatures of environment; but environment, I suppose,
would sound more scientific. Atavism also is a new word, instead of
family likeness, but unless carefully defined, the word is very apt to
mislead us.

When it is said[4] that children often resemble their grandfathers or
grandmothers more than their immediate parents, and that this
propensity is termed atavism, this does not seem quite correct even
etymologically, for atavus in Latin did not mean father or
grandfather, but at first great-great-great-grandfather, and then
only ances