How far are the moral qualities acquired in one generation inherited by the next? Inasmuch as all development is by inappreciable increments, all change of organization gradual, or, in psychical terms, inasmuch as character varies only slowly from the grooves of established habit, there is a general truth in the statement that all habit prominent enough to be noticed as such can generally be traced farther back than the next generation only. Nevertheless, here are a few cases for the Weismannites:—
"Gall speaks of a Russian family in which the father and grandfather had died prematurely, the victims of taste for strong drink. The grandson, at the age of five, manifested the same liking in the highest degree."
"Trélat, in his work 'Folie Lucide,' states that a lady of regular life and economical habits was subject to fits of uncontrollable dipsomania. Loathing her state, she called herself a miserable drunkard, and mixed the most disgusting substances with her wine, but all in vain; the passion was stronger than her will. The mother and the uncle of this lady had also been subject to dipsomania."
"Charles X——, son of an eccentric and intemperate father, manifested instincts of great cruelty from infancy. He was sent at an early age to various schools, but was expelled from them all. Being forced to enlist in the army, he sold his uniform for drink and only escaped a sentence of death on the testimony of physicians, who declared that he was the victim of an irresistible appetite. He was placed under restraint, and died of general paralysis."
"A man belonging to the educated class, and charged with important functions, succeeded for a long time in concealing his alcoholic habits from the eyes of the public; his family were the only sufferers by it. He had five children, only one of whom lived to maturity. Instincts of cruelty were manifested in this child, and from an early age its sole delight was to torture animals in every conceivable way. He was sent to school, but could not learn. In the proportions of the head he presented the character of microcephalism, and in the field of intellectual acquisition he could only reach a certain low stage, beyond which further progress was impossible. At the age of nineteen he had to be sent to an asylum for the insane."
"A man of an excellent family of laboring people was early addicted to drink, and died of chronic alcoholism, leaving seven children. The first two of these died, at an early age, of convulsions. The third became insane at twenty-two, and died an idiot. The fourth, after various attempts at suicide, fell into the lowest grade of idiocy. The fifth, of passionate and misanthropic temper, broke off all relations with his family. His sister suffers from nervous disorder, which chiefly takes the form of hysteria, with intermittent attacks of insanity. The seventh, a very intelligent workman, but of nervous temperament, freely gives expression to the gloomiest forebodings as to his intellectual future."
"Dr. Morel gives the history of a family living in the Vosges, in which the great-grandfather was a drunkard, and died from the effects of intoxication; and the grandfather, subject to the same passion, died a maniac. He had a son far more sober than himself, but subject to hypochondria and of homicidal tendencies; the son of this latter was stupid, idiotic. Here we see, in the first generation, alcoholic excess; in the second, hereditary dipsomania; in the third, hypochondria; and in the fourth, idiocy and probable extinction of the race."[154]
It is the general testimony of authorities that mental disease may thus appear in one generation as general tendency to excess, in another as homicidal mania, in another as microcephalism, etc. Here we have examples of the hereditary character of what we recognize as nervous disease, which yet has its moral as well as its intellectual side. There are few who do not recognize the power of the parent, through injury to his own health, to affect the health of his children; and yet that which we call disease is not more physical than that which we call moral characteristic. However, the physical side of that which we call normal moral characteristic is more withdrawn from observation; that which is recognized as mental disease forms, in this respect, a link between what we term ill-health and mental characteristic. The physical features of what we term ill-health attract our attention especially because of the weakness and incapacity or the distinct physical pain involved; the physical side of insanity comes also more or less distinctly to our notice, but the physical accompaniments of normal characteristic attract less attention. And yet all these three conditions have each a psychical and each a physiological side. It is therefore difficult to understand how the possibility of the inheritance of ill-health from want or excess can be acknowledged and yet the possibility of the inheritance of psychical characteristic acquired by the parent be doubted; the latter has its organic side as much as the former. And no better illustration of this fact can be found than in just such cases as those above cited, where that which appears in the first place as mere excess, that is, moral characteristic as we ordinarily term it, takes finally the form of microcephalism, idiocy, or insanity.
Man's early existence as an individual is distinguished by the length of duration of a condition of helplessness, at the beginning of which, beyond the fundamental so-called organic action, only a few simple activities manifest themselves. The human being is born with almost everything to acquire, and the earlier years, during which habits are slowly accumulating, appear peculiarly adaptive or formative. The human child is peculiarly susceptible, as regards mental and moral acquirements, to the nature of his surroundings. But this fact does not necessarily mean any more than what Stephen asserts in the last of the three quotations above cited, namely, that the social medium is an essential factor of the result; it does not necessarily exclude the inheritance of moral or immoral tendency acquired under civilization or even by near ancestors. Even in cases of the inheritance of the most extreme passion for alcohol, we cannot suppose that the taste would ever have manifested itself, had alcohol never come within the reach of the inheriting individual. The young kitten that has never tasted meat will snatch at a piece as soon as it scents it; but we cannot suppose that the evidently inherited taste for flesh would ever appear, did flesh never come within the range of its sense-perception. Since a suitable environment must always be conceived as essential to the development even of the most inveterate inherited qualities, and since man's mental and especially his moral superiority has been developed in connection with social conditions, it is conceivable that, these conditions failing, his mental and moral development may show a lack coördinate with the degree of such failure. And here is an answer to those who, in contesting the theory of any moral inheritance, state their views in the final form that if any inheritance at all can be claimed, it can only be as a certain degree of readiness in responding to the conditions of civilization; no inheritance can ever be anything more than this; the existence, to a sufficient degree, of complementary conditions in the environment is always necessary to the development of tendency. It is, therefore, conceivable that the child of civilized parents of a higher type of morality, if carried off, in infancy, by savages, might fail to exhibit the high character of its parents, just as it is conceivable and more than probable that it would fail to exhibit their higher intellectual gifts. It is also conceivable that the child of moral parentage may inherit the capacity of high moral development and yet fall into crime, if circumstances afford him no education save that of association with hardened criminals. We might only with reason expect to find, in the case of the supposed child abducted by savages, a certain mental acuteness applied to savage affairs and some greater degree of humane feeling, dominated, however, by savage conceptions; as also greater ease in the acquirement of civilized ideas and customs in case of a return to higher surroundings before maturity; and we might only expect to find, in the case of the child brought up among criminals, a greater degree of that primitive honor and faithfulness which may exist among criminals. Modern reformatories have testified to the possibility of the redemption of a large number of criminals from their evil life, but they have shown, nevertheless, that there is a lust of cupidity, a love of meanness, and an animality from which rescue is almost if not quite impossible. The reaction of men whose past opportunities have been about equal, upon effort for their reform, exhibits also very different degrees of readiness. The testimony of reformatories for the young is especially of worth on this point; and I once heard Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, whose interest in reformatories and prisons is well known, describe the faces of many of the children to be found in a certain institution of this sort, as bearing fearful witness to the fact that they had been "mortgaged to the devil before they were born." I remember a number of cases cited by the matron of a certain orphan asylum showing that children taken from their home at too early an age to have learned the sins of their parents by imitation may yet repeat those sins. Out of three children of the same parents, the one of whom was a drunkard and prostitute, the other a thief, one developed, at a very early age, a tendency to dishonesty, another an extreme morbid eroticism, and the third child appeared to have escaped the evil inheritance; but he was still very young when I last heard of him. The two children did not exhibit these evil traits at their entrance to the home, but developed them later.
And here it may be noticed that the fact of the unformed character of the infant does not prove that the tendencies which make their appearance in later life are wholly the result of the environment. It has been remarked by biologists and pathologists that inherited characteristics tend to appear at an age corresponding to that at which they appeared in the progenitor. The caterpillar does not undergo metamorphosis with a less regularity because it is not, in the beginning, a butterfly, and the beard does not the less appear in the adult human male because he was not born bearded. Diseases of the brain often develop, for several generations, at nearly the same age, and there seems to be no reason why we should not suppose the like to be true in the case of many normal characteristics. Ribot cites from Voltaire the following case: "'I have with my own eyes,' he writes, 'seen a suicide that is worthy of the attention of physicians. A thoughtful professional man, of mature age, of regular habits, having no strong passions, and beyond the reach of want, committed suicide on the 17th of October, 1769, leaving behind him, addressed to the council of his native city, an apology for his voluntary death, which it was not thought advisable to publish, lest men should be encouraged to quit a life whereof so much evil is spoken. So far there is nothing extraordinary, since instances of this kind are everywhere to be found; but here is the astonishing feature of the case: his father and his brother had committed suicide at the same age as himself. What hidden disposition of mind, what sympathy, what concurrence of physical laws, caused this father and his two sons to perish by their own hand and by the same form of death, just when they had acquired the same year of their age?'"[155] Ribot continues:—