Environment when properly subordinated to and illuminated by heredity does not cease to be important. Environment may provide wings to fly with and an atmosphere capable of sustaining weight, even when it cannot provide the will to fly. To return to our agricultural symbolism: environment cannot make or change the nature of the seed, it is the soil, the sunshine and the succulence, but it has to take the seed as it is. Heredity is inside the seed and goes behind the seed to the mother plant. Heredity is what our ancestors meant when they said predestination, necessity, destiny. Philosophers of pre-Darwin days have lured mankind into the pleasant but dangerously untrue belief that human nature is essentially and universally good. This crude generalisation of Rousseau's gospel does some injustice to that great man's philosophy which represented a necessary revolt from the soul-destroying perversion of heredity which described man as uniformly "born in sin and shaped in iniquity." Experience has revolted against both extremes. The Heavenly father is no longer a Fiend who destines "one to heav'n and ten to hell," and the Earthly Parent emerges from his ancient unimportance. Man is in neither case fortuitous, his nature, potentiality and destiny are writ large in the study of his heredity. We are all, like poets, born not made; as we are: we remain: we develop on lines long ago laid down for us by other forces than those environment can control and it is still impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. This consideration puts into proper perspective the things which matter, and warns us to cease vain expenditure on unscientific philanthropy. The efforts wasted on watering weeds might have made the garden smile with fragrant flowers. Environment means opportunity. We shall understand better how and why environments need reconstruction when we recognise the superior importance of heredity. We shall begin to realise the uselessness of forcing qualities into the human organism, and become all the more anxious to afford opportunity for developing whatever utilisable qualities are already there existent. We shall learn to educate, in the old sense of the word. We shall bring out the maximum of the good within. We will no longer tolerate the cruelties and crudities of abortive attempts to instil properties and qualities of character which not being inherent can never be successfully inoculated. CHAPTER III THE CHILD AND ITS HERITAGE