CHAPTER II. THE ENVIRONMENTAL BASIS OF CHARACTER

From the time any one of us is born into the world he is subject
to the influences of forces that reach backwards to the earliest
days of the race. The "dead hand" rules,--yes, and the dead
thought, belief and custom continue to shape the lives and
character of the living. The invention and development of speech
and writing have brought into every man's career the mental life
and character of all his own ancestors and the ancestors of every
other man.

A child is not born merely to a father and a mother. He is born
to a group, fiercely and definitely prejudiced in custom, belief
and ideal, with ways of doing, feeling and thinking which it
seeks to impose on each of its new members. Family, tribe, race
and nation all demand of each accession that he accept their
ideals, habits and beliefs on peril of disapproval and even of
punishment. And man is so constituted that the approval and
disapproval of his group mean more to him even than his life.

The social setting into which each one is born is his social
heredity. "The heredity with which civilization is most
supremely concerned," says Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, "is not that
which is inborn in the individual. It is the SOCIAL inheritance
which constitutes the dominant factor in human progress."[1] It
is this social inheritance which shapes our characters,
rough-hewn by nature. It is by the light of each person's social
inheritance that we must also judge his character.