feeble
mind will result in fairly able-minded offspring, who may even be above
the average, mentally, such offspring carry in their own germ plasm the
defect derived from their feeble-minded parent, which defect may then be
passed on to future generations through the germ plasm from which their
children get their inheritance. A mother's hereditary influence on the
child is just as important a factor as the father's, generally speaking.
Where feeble-mindedness exists on a family line, care should be
exercised by the able-minded members of that line not to mate with
another line possessing cases of feeble-mindedness, lest the offspring
then fall heir to feeble-mindedness, which can skip a generation. An
appreciation of what is feeble-minded, and a realization of its
inheritability can not help but modify a man or a woman's admiration
for the traits or lack of traits which it embraces.

Persons possessing weak physical makeups may possess strong mental
capacities, and vice-versa. Persons of superior mental capacities may
lack loftiness of character. It might happen that in so mating as to
prevent the perpetuation of an undesirable trait, physical, mental or
moral, a desirable trait would be lost along with it. In any mating
transaction, therefore, choice must necessarily compromise upon the
favorable hereditary action of a majority of the traits on the two
family lines. One must relinquish any quest for perfection. After
eliminating the individuals possessing the grossly unsocial traits below
the dividing line of social fitness, one must choose with respect to a
majority of socially fit traits, in addition to the elements of personal
congeniality and affinity. The two last-named elements, however,
generally serve as useful narcotics in blinding the mating individuals
to the existence of the compromise, and the real becomes the ideal.

[Sidenote: Successive Generations and Fraternities]

Each trait in the mosaic of one person is transmitted or not transmitted
to a child according to the mating of that particular trait--mating
with trait or lack of trait--rather than according to the mating of the
two persons as a whole. That is, when a man and woman marry and bear
offspring, it is not the mating of two units, but it is the mating of
myriads of pairs of units--the units being the constituent traits and
lack of traits (contained in some mysterious way in the germ plasm),
each trait-mating producing its own trait-offspring.