'We sometimes see the reappearance, in remote descendants, of ancient race-instincts that for many generations have lain dormant or hidden, but which now come to light as an unaccountable return to the moral type of the ancestors. The higher classes of society furnish us with the most striking instances of this; as if the leisure and independence which their wealth assures to them, exempting them from the influence of the local environment and the present conditions of the life of their race, set at liberty psychical forces which are held in check among their contemporaries. Thus an irresistible instinct for theft not only is sometimes manifested among the children of cultivated races, in whom it is usually soon corrected by education, but even at times persists in adults, and with irresistible force betrays women belonging to our ancient noble castes into offences hardly excusable by their inability to conquer fate or evidently fatalistic character-unhappy heiresses of the old instincts of our barbarous conquerors.

contraduction

J

'So, too, with that passionate love of hunting, which is no longer of use under our present social conditions; which exists more or less as an instinct in every child; which even persists and develops so readily in every adult possessed of the means of indulging it, and inspires all our fashionable youth, and the remnants of our territorial nobility; it can only be explained by the blind and predestined heredity of race-instincts that have long survived their utility, in the descendants of peoples for whom these same instincts were long essential conditions of life. Here, then, we have merely phenomena of atavism, which preserves, or bring to light at intervals, the psychical characteristics of remote ancestors.'1

It would be hard to find a more striking example of the tenacity of savage instincts, and of their tendency to reappear, than is found in the following narrative from a voyage to the Philippine Islands :

'These savages have ever been distinguished from the other Polynesian races by their unconquerable love of freedom. The repugnance of the Negritos (as the Philippine Islanders are called). to everything that could subjugate them or make them live by rule, will make them always objects of interest to the traveller. Here is an instance of their love of independence :

1 Origine de l'Homme et de Sociétés, par Mme. Royer, ch. iv.

'In a raid made on the Isle of Luçon by native soldiers, under the orders of a Spanish officer, a young black about three years old was taken prisoner. He was carried to Manilla. An American having offered the authorities to adopt him, the boy was baptized and named Pedrito.

'When he was of proper age to receive some instruction, an effort was made to give him as good an education as is to be got in those remote regions. Old residents in the island, who knew the Negrito character, laughed in their sleeves at the attempts made to civilize Pedrito. They predicted that sooner or later the young savage would go back to his mountains. His adopted father, aware of the jests made on his care for Pedrito, was nettled by them, and announced his intention of taking the boy to Europe. He took him to New York, Paris, and London, and only brought him back to the Philippines at the end of two years' travelling.

'Gifted with all the readiness of the black race, Pedrito spoke with equal fluency Spanish, French, and English; he would wear on his feet nothing but fine, polished boots, and every one at Manilla to this day remembers the grave air, worthy of a "gentleman," with which he met the first advances of persons who had not been introduced to him. Scarcely two years after his return from-Europe he disappeared from the house of his protector. The mockers triumphed. We should probably never have learned what became of the philanthropic Yankee's adopted son were it not for the singular meeting a European had with him. A Prussian naturalist, a kinsman of the celebrated Humboldt, resolved to make the ascent of Mount Marivalis, not far from Manilla. He had almost reached the summit of the peak when he all at once found himself in presence of a swarm of little blacks. The Prussian was preparing to sketch a few portraits when one of the savages drew near to him smiling, and asked him, in English, if he was acquainted at Manilla with an American of the name of Graham. It was our friend Pedrito. He told his entire history; when it was ended, the naturalist tried, but in vain, to induce him to return with him to Manilla.' 1

.

In missionary narratives we find abundance of similar facts.

1 Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 Juin, 1869.

Thus the missionary societies sometimes adopt Chinese infants and have them educated in European institutions at great expense:

they go back to their own country with the resolve to propagate pueding

the Christian religion, but scarcely have they disembarked when

the spirit of their race seizes upon them, they forget their promises, and lose all their Christian beliefs. It might be supposed that they had never left China. 1

To sum up, the consequences of heredity have been found to be twofold. Now it builds for the future, making possible, by the accumulation of simple sentiments, the production of sentiments more complex. Again it goes back towards the past, setting up / again forms of sensitive activity once natural, now in disaccord with their environment. For there exist in the bottom of

the soul, buried in the depths of our being, savage instincts,ting nomadic tastes, unconquered and sanguinary appetites which yougle slumber but die not. They resemble those rudimentary organs quilly

which have outlived their functions, but which still remain as witnesses to the slow, progressive evolution of the forms of life. And these savage instincts, developed in man during the past, whilst he lived free amid the forests and streams, are from time to time recalled by heredity, by some trick which we do not understand, as though to let us measure with the eye the length of road over which we have travelled.

CHAPTER III.

MORAL CONSEQUENCES OF HEREDITY.

I.

At the first step in every study of morals we meet the inextricable problem of free-will. We are the less able to avoid it here, since it touches our subject at more than one point. We have already often directed attention to the fatalistic character of hereditary transmission, and the reader must see that what we give to heredity we take from free-will, and that heredity offers an abundant

1 A. Réville, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1° Septbre, 1869.

source, though hitherto but little explored, of arguments in favour of fatalism. This much is certain, that heredity and free-will are two opposite and irreconcilable terms. The one creates in us the personality, the character; it is the peculiar mark which distinguishes us from what is not ourselves; it is that in us which is most essential, most intimate. The other tends to substitute the species for the person, to blot out what is individual, and to subject all to the impersonal fatalism of its laws, so that we are necessarily destined to feel, think, and act as our fathers, whose thoughts, apparently extinct, re-live in us. In a word, by freewill we are ourselves, by heredity we are others.

We have, therefore, to consider the question of free-will. This we will endeavour to do very briefly, dismissing all solutions that have been disproved, and simply exhibiting the question as it stands in the present state of science.

The partisans and the opponents of free-will may contend for ever without agreeing, provided each side stands on its own ground and will not quit it. Those who hold the affirmative proceed subjectively, saying: I have an inner sense of my freedom of will, therefore I am free. Those who hold those negative proceed objectively, saying: All things are regulated according to laws; moral as well as physical science proves this, therefore free-will is an illusion. Each occupies a point of view totally different from that of the other.

The argument of the former seems at first view decisive, but on reflection it is found less conclusive. If, with the greater part of the philosophers in the last two centuries, we consider psychological life as limited to the domain of consciousness, and if we identify the soul with the ego, then we may hold that the various motives of which we are conscious are counsel, advice, reasons, subjects of deliberation, but they are not that which deliberates, compares, selects; and that, consequently, a voluntary act supposes, besides motives, something more. But if we may hold, as we may with truth, that besides the conscious life there is also an unconscious life whose influence is very great on our sentiments, our passions, our ideas, our activity in general, who can tell what part this unconscious agent may play in our determinations? Hence the assertion, I have a consciousness that I am free, therefore I am free,

loses much of its value, because consciousness supplies only a portion of the elements of the problem, and by no means supplies them all. Furthermore, this unconscious agency, which is overlooked, may be, as we shall see, the very groundwork, the essence, and, as it were, the root of the will.

As for those who, regarding the testimony of consciousness as secondary, adopt an objective method, they derive their arguments chiefly from two sources, physical and physiological phenomena, and historical and social facts.

The physical world, say they, is subject to the laws of a determinism which allows no exception. Experience proves, and science demands this. Science is explanation; to explain is to determine, and to determine a phenomenon is to refer it to its immediate conditions, or to its laws. We have no intelligible idea of a phenomenon that is produced spontaneously, with nothing to determine it to be, or to be in one way rather than in another. That would be a creation ex nihilo, a miracle. Leibnitz, and after him Laplace, have very forcibly expressed this truth. Physics and chemistry having demonstrated that nothing comes into being and that nothing perishes-neither matter nor force-that there occur only transformations, which themselves are determinable, the idea of universal determinism has become a scientific commonplace. The principle of the correlation or equivalence of forces is the highest expression of this belief in determinism. Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer, taking his stand on this principle of equivalence, reduces all phenomena, without exception, to transformations of motion; according to him, social facts arise out of certain psychological states, and these out of certain physiological conditions, life itself resulting from the play of physical forces: 'And if it be asked, whence these physical forces which through the intermedium of the vital forces produce the social forces? we reply, as we have all along, from solar radiation.'

In a world where all things are so firmly linked together, what place is there for free-will? What right have you, say the determinists, to break up the series of effects and causes, for the purpose of bringing in an unintelligible spontaneity? You say, when I wish to move my arm I move it; but this movement is not, as you suppose, a creation-it must have already existed in your organism