Book Description

Facts And Fictions Of Life There are at least two sides to every question. Usually there are several times two sides; or at least there are several phases in which the question has a different aspect. I am led to state these seemingly unnecessary truisms because I have been confronted by hearers or readers who assumed, since I had presented a certain phase or manifestation of heredity in a given article or lecture, that I was intending to argue that a fixed rule of transmission would necessarily follow the line I had then and there drawn. Nothing could be farther from my idea of the workings of the law of heredity. Nothing could be more absurdly inadequate to the solution and comprehension of a great basic principle. Again; an auditor or critic remarks that "We must not forget that we, also, get our heredity from God;" which is much as if one were to say, in teaching the multiplication table, "Remember that three times three is nine except, only, the times when God makes it fifteen." So absolute a misconception of the very meaning of the word heredity could hardly be illustrated in any other way as in the idea of "getting it from God." Scientific terms and facts of this nature cannot be confounded with metaphysical and religious speculation without hopeless confusion as to ideas, and absolute worthlessness as to the results of the investigation. The very foundation principle of Evolution, itself, depends upon the persistence of the laws of hereditary traits, habits and conditions, modified and diversified by environment and by the introduction of other hereditary strains from other lines of ancestry. Of course, there are people who do not believe that Evolution evolves with any greater degree of regularity and persistence than is consistent with the idea of a Deity who is liable to change his plans to meet the prayers or plaints of aspiration or repentance of those who chance to beg or demand of him certain immunities from the workings of the laws of nature. But with this type of mentality—with this grade of intellectual grasp—it were fruitless to pause to argue. They must be left to an education and an evolution of a less emotional and imaginative cast before they will be able to take part intelligently in a scientific discussion even where the merest alphabet of the science is touched, as is the case in these essays. They must learn a method of thought which keeps inside of what is, or can be, known and demonstrated, and cease to vitiate the very basic premises by injecting into them what is merely hoped or prayed for. The two phases of thought are quite distinct and totally dissimilar in method.