Sec. 1


With a skin of infinite delicacy that life will harden very speedily,
with a discomforted writhing little body, with a weak and wailing
outcry that stirs the heart, the creature comes protesting into the
world, and unless death win a victory, we and chance and the forces of
life in it, make out of that soft helplessness a man. Certain things
there are inevitable in that man and unalterable, stamped upon his
being long before the moment of his birth, the inherited things, the
inherent things, his final and fundamental self. This is his
"heredity," his incurable reality, the thing that out of all his being,
stands the test of survival and passes on to his children. Certain
things he must be, certain things he may be, and certain things are for
ever beyond his scope. That much his parentage defines for him, that is
the natural man.

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