Heredity and parenthood / by Samuel Christian Schmucker.

  • Schmucker, Samuel Christian, 1860-1943.
Date:
1929
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Heredity and parenthood / by Samuel Christian Schmucker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    fortunate enough to arrive on earth while this planet is climbing the heavens were thought to be doomed from the start. They are born with a grouch, grow up with a grouch, and die in the same unhappy frame of mind. They are sullen and sodden—they are saturnine. Shakespeare shows in his time that men already doubted the influence of the stars when in his play of Julius Caesar he makes Cassius say : The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves that we are underlings. But to this day any big city has people who, seriously or fraudulently, will cast the horoscope of any who are willing to pay the price—which should certainly be small. Shakespeare with the wonderful breadth of mind with which he seemed to foresee and put into poetical form so much of the wisdom of the world, has given us a mar velous phrase. In that charming play of his late life, The Tempest, he presents us with a hideous, half-hu man creature, Caliban. His master, Prospero speaking of Caliban says : A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick. Of course what he means is that the wretch is so miser ably bad in his very origin that no amount of training, of example, of education can make him anything better than he is. Here is the whole modern idea in a particularly apt phrase—All we are, we are either by nature or by nurture. Either it was born in us, at least in its possibilities, or it