always a new color; a strange star. Every birth is as
lonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a monstrosity.

On all such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of ardent
ignorance; and nobody has ever been able to offer any theories of moral
heredity which justified themselves in the only scientific sense; that
is that one could calculate on them beforehand. There are six cases,
say, of a grandson having the same twitch of mouth or vice of character
as his grandfather; or perhaps there are sixteen cases, or perhaps
sixty. But there are not two cases, there is not one case, there are no
cases at all, of anybody betting half a crown that the grandfather will
have a grandson with the twitch or the vice. In short, we deal with
heredity as we deal with omens, affinities and the fulfillment of
dreams. The things do happen, and when they happen we record them; but
not even a lunatic ever reckons on them. Indeed, heredity, like dreams
and omens, is a barbaric notion; that is, not necessarily an untrue, but
a dim, groping and unsystematized notion. A civilized man feels himself
a little more free from his family. Before Christianity these tales of
tribal doom occupied the savage north; and since the Reformation and
the revolt against Christianity (which is the religion of a civilized
freedom) savagery is slowly creeping back in the form of realistic
novels and problem plays. The curse of Rougon-Macquart is as heathen and
superstitious as the curse of Ravenswood; only not so well written.
But in this twilight barbaric sense the feeling of a racial fate is not
irrational, and may be allowed like a hundred other half emotions that
make life whole. The only essential of tragedy is that one should take
it lightly. But even when the barbarian deluge rose to its highest in
the madder novels of Zola (such as that called "The Human Beast", a
gross libel on beasts as well as humanity), even then the application
of the hereditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and fumbling. The
students of heredity are savages in this vital sense; that they stare
back at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to schemes. In practice
no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physical
inheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely used except
for special modern purposes, such as the endowment of research or the
oppression of the poor.

*****

III. THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT

After all the modern