Nothing is more futile than general discussions of the relative importance of heredity and environment. It is much like the case of matter _versus_ mind; both are indispensable to every phase of life, and neither can exist apart from the other: they are coördinate in importance and incommensurable in nature. One might as well ask whether the soil or the seed predominates in the formation of a tree, as whether nature does more for us than nurture. The fact that most writers have a predilection for one of these factors at the expense of the other (Mr. Galton and the biological school, for example, seeing heredity everywhere, and not much else, while psychologists and sociologists put the stress on influence) means only that some are trained to attend to one class of facts and some to another. One may be more relevant for a given practical purpose than the other, but to make a general opposition is unintelligent. To the eye of sentiment a new-born child offers a moving contrast to the ancient and grimy world into which it so innocently enters; the one formed, apparently, for all that is pure and good, “trailing clouds of glory” as some think, from a more spiritual world than ours, pathetically unconscious of anything but joy; the other gray and saturnine, sure to prove in many ways a prison-house, perhaps a foul one. “Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight.”[134] No doubt, however, the pathos of this contrast arises in part from somewhat fallacious preconceptions. The imagination idealizes the child, reading its own visions into his innocence as it does into the innocence of the sea and the mountains, and contrasting his future career not with what he is, but with an ideal of what he might become. In truth the child already feels, in his own way, the painful side of life; he has the seeds of darkness in him as well as those of light, and cannot in strictness be said to be any better than the world. The good of life transcends his imagination as much as does the evil, and he could not become anything at all except in a social world. The pity of the matter, which may well move every one who thinks of it to work for better homes, schools and playgrounds, is simply that we are about to make so poor a use of a plastic material, that he might be so much better and happier if we would prepare a better place for him. It is true, in a sense, as Bacon says, that youth has more of divinity, but perhaps we might also say that it has more of deviltry; the younger life is, the more unbound it is, not yet in harness, with more divine insight and more reckless passion, and adolescence is the period of criminality as well as of poetry.