The power of environment : nurture versus nature / editor: Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D.

Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The power of environment : nurture versus nature / editor: Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the personality of any particular Smith or Jones or X. Y. or Z of today. An awful thought, is it not? What wonder that we poor conglomerate mortals are torn by doubts and uncertainties, and contradictory as- pirations and conflicting passions? What won- der that consistency is rarest of jewels? The wonder is rather that we can manage to spin any continuous or rational thread of life at all out of such a tangle of unmiscible tendencies. “Like be- gets like” has ceased to be the simple principle that it seemed. Why are We Not All Alike ? It appears, then, to use a graphic illustration, that every individual represents the apex of an in- verted pyramid of descent, whose base, extending back into history, at some point coincides with the base of a sectional plane of the ancestral pyramid of every other individual of his race. Why, then, since the same principle has ap- plied to all, are the apices not all identical? How has the principle “like begets like,” ap- plied to a common ancestry, produced such a diversity of descendants? Heredity, unaided, can give but one answer to this question. It is because the elements of this conglomerate ancestry have not been mixed equally. [18]
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