We return, with a better chance of distinguishing them, to the consideration of the special effects that it brings about.

It was said just now that heredity is the stiffening in human nature, a stiffening bound up with a more or less considerable offset of plasticity.

Now clearly it is in some sense true that the child's whole nature, its modicum of plasticity included, is handed on from its parents.

Our business in this chapter, however, is on the whole to put out of our thoughts this plastic side of the inherited life-force.

The more or less rigid, definite, systematized characters--these form the hereditary factor, the race.
Now none of these are ever quite fixed.