But the scope of environment is undoubtedly so great, as I shall try to prove, that, be the heredity what it may, environment has power to save or damn.
Let us think what it means to be born quite without knowledge. Let us think what it means to owe all that we learn to environment.
So it is. Were it not for the action of environment, for the help of other men and women, we should live and die as animals; without morality, without decency, without the use of tools, or arms, or arts, or letters. We should be savages, or superior kinds of apes. That we are civilised and cultured men and women we owe to the fellow-creatures who gave into our infant hands the key to the stored-up knowledge and experience of the race.
The main difference between the Europe of to-day and the Europe of the old Stone Age is one of knowledge: that is, of environment
Suppose that a child of Twentieth-Century parents could be born into the environment of an earlier century. Would he grow up with the ideas of to-day, or with the ideas of those who taught and trained him? Most certainly he would fall into step with his environment: he would think with those with whom he lived, and from whom he learnt.
Born into ancient Athens, he would look upon slavery as a quite natural and proper thing born into ancient Scandinavia, he would grow up a Viking, would worship Thor and Odin, and would adopt piracy as the only profession for a man of honour born into the environment of the Spanish prime, he would think it a righteous act to roast heretics or to break Lutherans on the wheel. Born into the fanatical environment of Sixteenth-Century France, he would have no scruples against assisting in the holy massacre of St. Bartholomew's.
Born a Turk, he would believe the Koran, and accept polygamy and slavery. Born a Red Indian, he would scalp his slain or wounded enemies, and torture his prisoners. Born amongst cannibals, he would devour his aged relatives, and his faded wives, and most of the foes made captive to his bow and spear.
Suppose a child of modern English family could be born into the environment of Fourteenth-Century England!
He would surely believe in the Roman Catholic religion, in a personal devil, and in a hell of everlasting fire.
He would believe that the sun goes round the world, and that any person who thought otherwise was a child of the devil, and ought to be broiled piously and slowly at a fire of green faggots.