THERE are many who have some understanding of heredity and of
environment when taken separately who fail to realise their effects upon
each other.
The common cause of the stumbling is easy to remove.
It is often said that two men are differently affected by the same
environment, or what seems to be the same environment, and that
therefore there must be some power in men to "overcome" their
environment.
I have dealt with this argument already, showing that the contest
between a man and his environment is really a contest between heredity
and environment, and may be compared to the effort of a man to swim
against a stream.
A given environment will affect two different men differently because
their heredity is different.
But remembering that we are born without any knowledge, and that we are
born not with intellect nor conscience, but only with the rudiments
of such, it must be insisted that the hereditary power to resist
environment is very limited. So much so that we may amend our figure of
the swimmer and the stream, and say that no man, howsoever strong and
brave, could swim against a stream unless he had learnt to swim.
And the learning to swim is environment, and works against the contrary
environment, typified by the stream.
Let us take the case of two children. One has bad and one good heredity.
One is a healthy baby, born of moral stock. The other is a degenerate,
born of immoral stock. We will call the healthy baby Dick, and the
degenerate baby Harry.
They are taken at birth into an environment of theft, drunkenness, and
vice. They are taught to lie, to steal, and to drink. They never hear
any good, never see a good example.
Harry, the degenerate, will take to evil as a duck to water. Of that, I
think, there is no question. But what of Dick, the healthy baby?
Dick is born without knowledge. He is also born with undeveloped
propensities. He will learn evil. His propensities will be trained
to evil. How is he to "overcome his environment and become good"? He
_cannot_. What will happen in Dick's case is that he will become a
different kind of criminal--a stronger and cleverer criminal than Harry.
But, I hear some one say, "we know that children, born of thieves and
sots, and reared in bad surroundings, have turned out honest and sober
men." And the inference is that they rose superior to their environment.
But that inference is erroneous. The _fact_ is that these children were
saved by some _good_ environment, acting against the bad.
For there is hardly such a thing as an environment that is _all_ bad.
In the case of Dick and Harry we supposed an environment containing no
good. But that was for the sake of illustration.
For the environment to be _all_ bad, the child must be prevented from
ever seeing a good deed, or reading a good book, or meeting a good man,
woman, or child.
Now, we can imagine no town, nor slum, in which a child should never
hear nor see anything good. He is almost certain at some time or other
to encounter good influences.
And these good influences will affect a healthy child more strongly than
they will affect a degenerate, just as the evil influences will affect
him less fatally than they will affect a degenerate. Because the poor
degenerate is born with a bias towards disease or crime.
Two children may be born of the same parents, reared in the same hovel,
in the same slum, taught the same evil lesson. But they will meet
different companions, and will have different experiences.
One may meet a good boy, or girl, or man, or woman, and may be
influenced for good. The other may chance upon the very worst company.
Let us suppose that two children are born in a Hoxton slum, and that one
of them falls under the influence of a Fagin, and the other has the good
fortune to meet such a manly and sensible parson as our friend Cartmel!
Would not the effects be very different? Yet at first sight the
environment of the two boys would seem to be precisely alike.
And we shall always find that the man who rises above his environment
has really been helped by good environment to overcome the bad
environment He has learnt some good. And that learning is part of his
environment He must have been _taught_ some good if he knows any, for he
was born destitute of knowledge.
A good mother, a wise friend, a pure girl, an honest teacher, a noble
book, may save a child from the bad part of his environment.
It would appear at first sight that two boys taught in the same school,
by the same teacher, would have the same school environment. But at a
second thought we find that need not be the case.
We know what one bad boy can do in a class or in a room. We may know,
then, that the boys who share a class or a room with a bad boy have a
worse environment than the boys who escape his evil influences.
It is a mistake to think of heredity as all good, or all bad. It is
mixed. We inherit, _all_ of us, good and bad qualities.
It is a mistake to think of environment as all good or all bad. It is
mixed. There are always good and bad influences around every one of us.
It is a mistake to think that any two men ever did or can have exactly
the same environment.
It is as impossible for the environment of any two men to be identical,
as for their heredity to be identical. As there are no two men exactly
alike, so there are no two men whose experiences are exactly alike.
Good and bad environment work against each other. All kinds of
environment work with or against heredity. Different heredities make
different natures; different natures are differently affected by similar
environments. But the child, being born without knowledge and with
rudimentary faculties, is, whatever his heredity, almost wholly at the
mercy of his environment.