In the development of "character," much depends upon early nurture, education, and surrounding influences generally, but how the individual reacts to these must largely depend on his inheritance. Truly the individual himself makes his own character, but he does so by his habitual adjustment of his (hereditarily determined) constitution to surrounding influences. Nurture supplies the stimulus for the expression of the moral inheritance, and how far the inheritance can express itself is limited by the nurture-stimuli available just as surely as the result of nurture is conditioned by the hereditarily determined nature on which it operates. It may be urged that character, being a product of habitual modes of feeling, thinking, and acting, cannot be spoken of as _inherited_, but bodily character is also a product dependent upon vital experience. It seems to us as idle to deny that some children are "born good" or "born bad," as it is to deny that some children are born strong and others weak, some energetic and others "tired" or "old." It may be difficult to tell how far the apparently hereditary goodness or badness of disposition is due to the nutritive influences of the mother, both before and after birth, and we must leave it to the reader's experience and observation to decide whether we are right or wrong in our opinion that quite apart from maternal nutritive influence there is a genuine inheritance of kindly disposition, strong sympathy, good humor, and good will. The further difficulty that the really organic character may be half-concealed by nurture-effects, or inhibited by the external heritage of custom and tradition, seems less serious, for the selfishness of an acquired altruism is as familiar as honor among thieves. It is entirely useless to boggle over the difficulty that we are unable to conceive how dispositions for good or ill lie implicit within the protoplasmic unit in which the individual life begins. The fact is undoubted that the initiatives of moral character are in some degree transmissible, though from the nature of the case the influences of education, example, environment, and the like are here more potent than in regard to structural features. We cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, though the plasticity of character under nurture is a fact which gives us all hope. Explain it we cannot, but the transmission of the raw material of character is a fact, and we must still say with Sir Thomas Browne: "Bless not thyself that thou wert born in Athens; but, among thy multiplied acknowledgments, lift up one hand to heaven that thou wert born of honest parents, that modesty, humility, and veracity _lay in the same egg_, and came into the world with thee." 2. Inheritance of Original Nature[76] The principles of heredity (may be recapitulated as follows):