After all the modern clatter of Calvinism, therefore, it is only with
the born child that anybody dares to deal; and the question is not
eugenics but education. Or again, to adopt that rather tiresome
terminology of popular science, it is not a question of heredity but of
environment. I will not needlessly complicate this question by urging
at length that environment also is open to some of the objections and
hesitations which paralyze the employment of heredity. I will merely
suggest in passing that even about the effect of environment modern
people talk much too cheerfully and cheaply. The idea that surroundings
will mold a man is always mixed up with the totally different idea that
they will mold him in one particular way. To take the broadest case,
landscape no doubt affects the soul; but how it affects it is
quite another matter. To be born among pine-trees might mean loving
pine-trees. It might mean loathing pine-trees. It might quite seriously
mean never having seen a pine-tree. Or it might mean any mixture of
these or any degree of any of them. So that the scientific method here
lacks a little in precision. I am not speaking without the book; on the
contrary, I am speaking with the blue book, with the guide-book and the
atlas. It may be that the Highlanders are poetical because they inhabit
mountains; but are the Swiss prosaic because they inhabit mountains? It
may be the Swiss have fought for freedom because they had hills; did the
Dutch fight for freedom because they hadn’t? Personally I should
think it quite likely. Environment might work negatively as well as
positively. The Swiss may be sensible, not in spite of their wild
skyline, but be cause of their wild skyline. The Flemings may be
fantastic artists, not in spite of their dull skyline, but because of
it.
I only pause on this parenthesis to show that, even in matters
admittedly within its range, popular science goes a great deal too fast,
and drops enormous links of logic. Nevertheless, it remains the working
reality that what we have to deal with in the case of children is,
for all practical purposes, environment; or, to use the older word,
education. When all such deductions are made, education is at least
a form of will-worship; not of cowardly fact-worship; it deals with a
department that we can control; it does not merely darken us with the
barbarian pessimism of Zola and the heredity-hunt. We shall certainly
make fools of ourselves; that is what is meant by philosophy. But we
shall not merely make beasts of ourselves; which is the nearest popular
definition for merely following the laws of Nature and cowering under
the vengeance of the flesh. Education contains much moonshine; but not
of the sort that makes mere mooncalves and idiots the slaves of a silver
magnet, the one eye of the world. In this decent arena there are fads,
but not frenzies. Doubtless we shall often find a mare’s nest; but it
will not always be the nightmare’s.
*****