Yet this way of viewing childhood is not merely of antiquarian interest.
While a monument of his race, and in a manner a key to its history, the
child is also its product. In spite of the fashionable Weismannism of
the hour, there are evolutionists who hold that in the early manifested
tendencies of the child, we can discern signs of a hereditary
transmission of the effects of ancestral experiences and activities. His
first manifestations of rage, for example, are a survival of actions of
remote ancestors in their life and death struggles. The impulse of
obedience, which is as much a characteristic of the child as that of
disobedience, may in like manner be regarded as a transmitted rudiment
of a long practised action of socialised ancestors. This idea of an
increment of intelligence and moral disposition, earned for the
individual not by himself but by his ancestors, has its peculiar
interest. It gives a new meaning to human progress to suppose that the
dawn of infant intelligence, instead of being a return to a primitive
darkness, contains from the first a faint light reflected on it from the
lamp of racial intelligence which has preceded that instead of a return
to the race’s starting point, the lowest form of the school of
experience, it is a start in a higher form, the promotion being a reward
conferred on the child for the exertions of his ancestors. Psychological
observation will be well employed in scanning the features of the
infant’s mind in order to see whether they yield evidence of such
ancestral dowering.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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