man on gaining his sight
by an operation said that "all objects seemed to touch his eyes, as what
he felt did his skin"--so little had the universal experience of
countless ages impressed itself on his faculties. Under normal healthy
conditions use-inheritance is so slow in its action that "several
generations" must elapse before it produces any appreciable effect, and
then that effect is only precisely what selection might be expected to
bring about without its aid. Strong for evil and slow for good, it can
convey epilepsy promptly in guinea pigs, but transmits the acquirements
of genius so poorly that our best student of the heredity of genius has
to account for the frequent and remarkable deterioration of the
offspring by a theory which is strongly hostile to use-inheritance. It
would tend to make organisms unworkable by the excessive differences in
its rate and manner of action on co-operative parts, and by adapting
these parts to the total amount of nourishment received rather than to
occasional necessity or actual usefulness. It would tend to stereotype
habits and convert reason into instinct.

How then can we rely upon use-inheritance for the improvement of the
race? Even if it is not a sheer delusion, it may be more detrimental as
a positive evil than it is advantageous as an unnecessary benefit; and
as a normal modifying agent it is miserably weak and untrustworthy in
comparison with the powerful selective influences by which nature and
society continually and inevitably affect the species for good or for
evil. The effects of use and disuse--rightly directed by education in
its widest sense--must of course be called in to secure the highly
essential but nevertheless _superficial, limited, and partly deceptive_
improvement of individuals and of social manners and methods; but as
this artificial development of already existing potentialities does not
directly or readily tend to become congenital, it is evident that some
considerable amount of natural or artificial selection of the more
favourably varying individuals will still be the only means of securing
the race against the constant tendency to degeneration which would
ultimately swallow up all the advantages of civilization. The selective
influences by which our present high level has been reached and
maintained may well be modified, but they must not be abandoned or
reversed in the rash expectation that State education, or State feeding
of children, or Stat