My warmest thanks are due to Mr. FrancisDarwin, to Mr. E. B. Poulton (whose interest inthe subject here discussed is shown by his sharein the translation of Weismann's Essays onHeredity), and to Professor Romanes, for the helpafforded by their kindly suggestions and criticisms,and for the advice and recommendation underwhich this essay is now published. Encouragementfrom Mr. Francis Darwin is to me the moreprecious, and the more worthy of grateful recognition,from the fact that my general conclusionthat acquired characters are not inherited is[vi]at variance with the opinion of his revered father,who aided his great theory by the retention ofsome remains of Lamarck's doctrine of the inheritedeffect of habit. I feel as if the son, asrepresentative of his great progenitor, were carryingout the idea of an appreciative editor whowrites to me: "We must say that if Darwin werestill alive, he would find your arguments of greatweight, and undoubtedly would give to them theserious consideration which they deserve." Ihope, then, that I may be acquitted of unduepresumption in opposing a view sanctioned bythe author of the Origin of Species, but alreadystoutly questioned and firmly rejected by suchfollowers of his as Weismann, Wallace, Poulton,Ray Lankester, and others, to say nothing of itspractical rejection by so great an authority onheredity as Francis Galton.
The sociological importance of the subject hasalready been insisted on in emphatic terms by[vii]Mr. Herbert Spencer, and this importance maybe even greater than he imagined.
Civilization largely sets aside the harsh butultimately salutary action of the great law ofNatural Selection without providing an efficientsubstitute for preventing degeneracy. The substituteon which moralists and legislators rely—ifthey think on the matter at all—is thecumulative inheritance of the beneficial effects ofeducation, training, habits, institutions, and soforth—the inheritance, in short, of acquiredcharacters, or of the effects of use and disuse.If this substitute is but a broken reed, then thedeeper thinkers who gradually teach the teachersof the people, and ultimately even influence thelegislators and moralists, must found theirsystems of morality and their criticisms of socialand political laws and institutions and customsand ideas on the basis of the Darwinian lawrather than on that of Lamarck.[viii]
Looking forward to the hope that the humanrace may become consciously and increasinglymaster of itself and of its destiny, and recognizingthe Darwinian principle of the selectionof the fittest as the only means of preventing themoral and physical degeneracy which, like an internaldry rot, has hitherto been the besettingdanger of all civilizations, I desire that thethinkers who mould the opinions of mankind shallnot be led astray from the true