The making of character : some educational aspects of ethics / by John MacCunn.

  • MacCunn, John, 1846-1929.
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The making of character : some educational aspects of ethics / by John MacCunn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    21/246 (page 9)
    The recog¬ nised influence of “ social heredity ” is a ground for hope. What happens here conspicuously, happens in less degree in the instincts and capacities that are not “deferred.” Bare instinct, mere capacity, are things unknown, creatures of analysis. The actual fact is always proclivity and environment in living relation one to the other. The point is practical. When the child reproduces the parent, and especially when he does so with a baleful fidelity to what is bad, it is only too easy to lay the blame on “original sin.” But the damnosa hereditas is not always, perhaps it is never wholly, the gift of Nature. It comes from the remediable defect of the slipshod home, the barren or vicious example, the sour pasture of a miserable lot. No one nowadays will say that circumstance is everything. Are figs of thistles or flowers of thorns ? But circumstance—“social heredity” as some have called it, “tradition” as others have it—this is there from the first. And every discovery that analysis makes as to its manner of action, must feed the hopes and nerve the efforts of all, and especially of parents, with whom it rests to make it or to mar it. Yet Nature plays her part, and it is none the less unmistakeable though we need not expect to mark the precise point where nurture begins to be added to Nature. Thus it is Nature that allots to each of her sons his quantum of inherent force or energy. When men are out of heart at the inequalities assigns to each of human lot and faculty, and ready to rail at a certain quan- . , turn of energy. niggard Nature for their own shortcomings, it has been customary for preachers and moralists to tell them that, if they will, they can redress the balance, however un¬ favourable, by making themselves second to none in moral character. Has not the gospel of independence, from the Stoics to Burns, consoled the honest man with the assurance that he can be “king of men for a’ that?” “Brother, thou hast possibility in thee for much,” writes Carlyle, “the pos¬ sibility of writing on the eternal skies the record of a heroic