Climate is clearly a despotism
which we can never hope to reform away. Another school has taught that
men come into the world with innate ideas and a predetermined character.
Others again would dispute that man is in his actions a reasonable
being, and would represent him as the toy of passion, a creature to whom
it is useless to present an argument drawn from his own advantage. The
first task of the progressive philosopher is to clear away these
preliminary obstacles. Man is the creature of conditions, but primarily
of those conditions which he may hope to modify--education, religion,
social prejudice and above all government. He is also in the last resort
a being whose conduct is governed by his opinions. Admit these premises
and the way is clear towards perfection. It is a problem which in some
form and in some dialect confronts every generation of reformers. We are
the creatures of our own environment, but in some degree we are
ourselves a force which can modify that environment. We inherit a past
which weighs upon us and obsesses us, but in some degree each generation
is born anew. Godwin used the new psychology against the old
superstition of innate ideas. A modern thinker in his place would
advance Weissmann's biological theory that the acquired modifications of
an organism are not inherited, as an answer to the pessimism which bases
itself upon heredity.

Godwin starts boldly with the thesis that "the characters of men
originate in their external circumstances." He brushes aside innate
ideas or instincts or even ante-natal impressions. Accidents in the womb
may have a certain effect, and every man has a certain disposition at
birth. But the multiplicity of later experiences wears out these early
impressions. Godwin, in all this, reproduces the current fallacy of his
generation. Impressions and experiences were for them something
external, flung upon the surface of the mind. They were just beginning
to realise that the mind works when it perceives. Change a nobleman's
child at birth with a ploughman's, and each will grow up quite naturally
in his new circumstances. Exercise makes the muscles; education,
argument, and the exchange of opinion the mind. "It is impression that
makes the man, and compared with the empire of impression, the mere
differences of animal structure are inexpressibly unimportant and
powerless." Change continues through life; everything mental and
physical is in flux; why suppose that only i