As it is of the utmost importance that we should thoroughly understand the relations to each other of heredity and environment, this being a subject upon which there is much stumbling, we shall do well to make quite sure of our ground before we go a step farther.
It is erroneous to speak of "a struggle between a man and his environment," or of a man "rising above his environment".
What we call "a man" is a product of heredity and environment.
The "man" is largely what environment has already made him.
At the instant of birth a child may be regarded as wholly a product of heredity. But his first breath is environment. The first touch of the nurse's hands is environment. The first washing, the swaddling clothes, the "binder," and the first drop of mother's milk are parts of his environment.
And from the first moment of his birth until the time of his manhood, he is being continually moulded and affected by environment.
All his knowledge, all his beliefs, all his opinions are given to him by environment.
And now, with this in our mind, we can see the absurdity of Mr. Campbell's talk about John Bunyan.
Before his conversion Bunyan was already "a creature of heredity and environment." The very conscience of the man, which his wife, and the godly man, and Cromwell's soldiers, and the preachings in the church he frequented, were to awaken, had been created by environment.
For a child is born without conscience: with only the rudiments of a conscience, to be developed or destroyed—by environment.