[19] Boat-nets are the same in construction as setting-nets (see p. 192), but upwards of a yard in diameter. Instead of a cord and stick, they have attached to them four or five fathoms of grass line. A few small flat oval corks are spliced at short intervals into the end of the line remote from the net, and at the extremity is a cork buoy about half as large as a man's head.
[20] "The Hygiene of Mind," by T. S. Clouston, M.D., F.R.S.E., (London, 1906). Without an extension which Dr Clouston provides, though not in so many words, the definition I have italicized is psychologically a little superficial. Mental inhibition, generally, needs dividing into self-control and, say, auto-control. Where one man may self-control himself by an effort of will, another man, in the same predicament, might auto-control himself instinctively, without a conscious effort of will. Which is the saner, and likelier to remain so, under ordinary circumstances and under extraordinary circumstances, would be most difficult to determine. Many people are only sane in action because they know that they are insane in impulse, and take measures accordingly. They keep a sane front to the world by legislating pretty sternly for themselves.
[21] "The more one sees of the poor in their own homes, the more one becomes convinced that their ethical views, taken as a whole, can be more justly described as different from those of the upper classes than as better or worse." ("The Next Street but One." By M. Loane. London, 1907.)
[22] "When one begins to know the poor intimately, visiting the same houses time after time, and throughout periods of as long as eight or ten years, one becomes gradually convinced that in the real essentials of morality, they are, as a whole, far more advanced than is generally believed, but they range the list of virtues in a different order from that commonly adopted by the more educated classes. Generosity ranks far before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one. In brief, the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue, the higher it stands in popular estimation." ("From their Point of View." By M. Loane. London, 1908.)
It is difficult to see on what grounds Miss Loane implies—if she does mean to imply—that the poor would do well to exchange their own order of the virtues for the other order. Christianity certainly affords no such grounds, nor does any other philosophy or religion, except utilitarianism perhaps.
[23] Evolution is at present the last refuge of unscientific minds which think they have explained a process when they have given it a new name, just as chemists used to call an obscure chemical action catalytic and then assume that its nature was plain. Evolution means an unfolding. In that sense it is an observed fact, though exactly how the unfolding is brought about is still conjectural. But it does not matter for the purposes of my argument whether human beings evolve by the transmission to offspring of acquired characteristics, or by bequeathing to them as birthright an environment that their fathers had to make. The material for constructing any theory of mental, or joint mental and physical evolution, is so hazy that one cannot do more than speculate. It may be noted, however, that acquired mental characteristics appear to be more transmissible, and less stable, than acquired physical characteristics; and that mental evolution (in the broad sense again) proceeds faster and collapses more readily than physical evolution.