Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
But, in addition, there is much else to make up the whole adult man as
we know him. There is all that he has learnt since his birth, all that
he has been taught to do and trained to do, his language, the circle of
ideas he has taken to himself, the disproportions that come from unequal
exercise and the bias due to circumambient suggestion. There are a
thousand habits and a thousand prejudices, powers undeveloped and skill
laboriously acquired. There are scars upon his body, and scars upon his
mind. All these are secondary things, things capable of modification and
avoidance; they constitute the manufactured man, the artificial man.
And it is chiefly with all this superposed and adherent and artificial
portion of a man that this and the following paper will deal. The
question of improving the breed, of raising the average human heredity
we have discussed and set aside. We are going to draw together now as
many things as possible that bear upon the artificial constituent, the
made and controllable constituent in the mature and fully-developed man.
We are going to consider how it is built up and how it may be built up,
we are going to attempt a rough analysis of the whole complex process by
which the civilized citizen is evolved from that raw and wailing little
creature.
Before his birth, at the very moment when his being becomes possible,
the inherent qualities and limitations of a man are settled for good and
all, whether he will be a negro or a white man, whether he will be free
or not of inherited disease, whether he will be passionate or phlegmatic
or imaginative or six-fingered or with a snub or aquiline nose. And not
only that, but even before his birth the qualities that are not strictly
and inevitably inherited are also beginning to be made. The artificial,
the avoidable handicap also, may have commenced in the worrying, the
overworking or the starving of his mother. In the first few months
of his life very slight differences in treatment may have life-long
consequences. No doubt there is an extraordinary recuperative power in
very young children; if they do not die under neglect or ill-treatment
they recover to an extent incomparably greater than any adult could do,
but there remains still a wide marginal difference between what they
become and what they might have been. With every year of life the
recuperative quality diminishes, the initial handicap becomes more
irrevocable, the effects of ill-feeding, of unwholesome surroundings,
of mental and moral infections, become more inextricably a part of the
growing individuality. And so we may well begin our study by considering
the circumstances under which the opening phase, the first five years of
life, are most safely and securely passed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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