“Again the mother might have had very light convictions on temperance prior to the birth of the first two and very strong mental and moral opposition prior to the birth of the last two. Again something in the form of environment may have led the last two to overcome their inherited tendencies toward drink.”
Materialistic theory fails.—Materialistic philosophers admit that heredity tends to reproduce the likeness of the parents in the child. They try to explain this on a purely physical basis. Prof. Huxley, Mr. Spencer and the more modern Weismann, while they have each coined some new technical terms with which to convey their materialistic ideas, suppose that each procreative cell, masculine and feminine, contains a representative material something from every atom of the respective body from which it was formed. In this way the child has a body with marked resemblance to its parents. Since, according to their theory, all mental and moral phenomena are due to chemical changes and molecular disturbances in the brain, and since the child inherited a brain like its parents, the molecular movements of the child’s brain will be like the molecular movements in the brains of its parents; hence it will have inherited the mental and moral characteristics of the father and mother.
Life is a unit.—It takes only a few days for the procreative cells to be elaborated and matured. Here is a child. The initial of its life occurred twenty years after its parents had their right arms amputated. How could the procreative cells that formed the initial of that child’s life have in them a material representation from the right arms of those parents that had been amputated twenty years before the birth of the child? Suppose that the parents had undergone a much larger mutilation of the body, leaving them only the organs necessary to continued life and propagation, would the child have inherited the absent parts? Yes. Why? For the reason that sex is in the life of the individual, and not simply in the material substance of the body. A human body may have had some of the members removed but the physical life remains a unit. The embryo formed by the union of a masculine and a feminine cell will have a unit of physical life. During the nine months of gestation this unit of embryonic physical life will be incarnated in a unit of physical organism. Should a lobe of the brain of each parent, through which some mental or moral attribute functions, be removed, the child would inherit a unit of brain organism, for the reason that it inherited from the parents a unit of mental and moral life.
Sex a resident part of life.—These illustrations show that sex is vitally related to the physical, mental and moral life; that the physical nature of the child is the product of the union of the masculine and feminine principles of the physical life of the parents represented in the procreative cells; that the mental nature of the child is the product of the union of the masculine and feminine principles of the mental life of the parents represented in the procreative cells; that the spiritual nature of the child is the product of the union of the masculine and feminine principles of the spiritual life of the parents represented in the procreative cells. The three-fold life of a child is the product of the blending of the three-fold life of its parents.
Heredity explained.—The Bible tells us that “the blood is the life.” Science cannot express this truth better. The three-fold expressions of life are not in the blood. The blood furnishes life for every cell. Physical, mental and moral states are influenced by the conditions of the blood. These three natures meet and influence each other in the blood. Jesus appealed to the will of the patient. “Wilt thou be made whole?” “Arise, take up thy bed and walk.” “Stretch forth thy hand.” Jesus recognized the influence of the mind, expressed in will, as well as the spiritual expressed in faith, as a means of physical restoration. Every successful doctor, whatever may be his medical views, recognizes the value of a strong purpose to recover.
Effects of different mental states.—Men and animals alike lick a fresh wound. Nature teaches them that the saliva alleviates pain and heals the wound. If an angry person bites you, or you lick a wound after an hour of intense anger, you have a wound with all the symptoms of poison and it will be difficult to cure. Hundreds of cases are on record where angry mothers nursing their babies have thereby thrown them into convulsions or spasms. Jealousy will result in digestive disturbances. One can grieve so much over the loss of property or some member of the home by death as to injure the health. It is claimed that a great chemist took the various secretions from a subject that had been intensely angry for hours and succeeded in removing from the various secretions more than a score of poisons. In the case of another subject swayed by holy impulses, the kindest of feelings, the purest of love, he removed more than a score of wholesome, nutritious ingredients without a single poison.
Mental and moral states influence the offspring.—If right mental and moral states will give to the saliva, secreted from the blood, curative properties; and wrong mental and moral states will give the saliva a poisonous nature; if right mental and moral states influence the milk secreted by the breasts of a mother in a normal way; and wrong mental and moral states will so influence the mother’s blood as to throw her four-months-old nursing babe into spasms, cannot the father’s mental and moral states influence the creative secretions from his blood, and the mother’s mental and moral states, at the creative moment and during the nine months of embryonic and fetal development, influence the creative and life sustaining and life-developing secretions from her blood?
Who was to blame?—I once met a family during one of my lecture courses and was entertained in the home over night. Their children, five in number, all during my lecture picked at each other, scratched each other, fought each other, fussed, quarreled and cried. As we rode in the carriage to their home and during our visit those youngsters kept up this same line of entertainment. After I had retired the man stepped into my room and whispered to me that he and his wife were in great trouble, that they had been at the point of separation for ten years and asked me to teach them how to live happily together, and to be less miserable. I asked him to tell me the cause of their inharmony. “Oh, there is but one trouble between wife and me!” He spoke as if that were quite insignificant. Finally he told me that the trouble in the home was, “neither of us can control our tempers.” As he left my room I realized that for once in life I had a government contract on my hands. Then I mused: “Ten years of quarreling, ten years of disagreement, ten years of family feuds and family strife and these parents have transmitted more of bad disposition to their children than the children will be able to conquer in a lifetime, or these parents will be able to whip out of them before they are of age, chasing them around over a three-hundred-acre farm.” Continuing my meditation I thought: “If I had the power to make laws, I would make a law of mercy for such unfortunate children as these. That law would provide that where parents transmit as much unnecessary devilment to their children as these parents have to theirs, that the children should have the legal right to whip their daddies and mammies.”
The child not an exact duplicate of either parent.—These parents had produced their mental and moral states in their children.
These illustrations will help you to understand the philosophy of heredity. The two cells that unite to form the initial of every new life are elaborated from the blood of their respective parents and each cell has the physical, mental and moral natures of its parents in potential form. Were it possible for a child to inherit its size, form, features, disposition, tendencies, etc., from only one of its parents, and to grow to maturity uninfluenced by environment and education, it would necessarily be an exact duplicate of that parent. Because of its dual parentage, the maternal impressions received before birth, and the ever varying influences of environment and education, the child will be unlike any other person that ever lived.