Cultural inheritance

“ But to pass from this treasuring of truth to the dynastic privilege of ideas or powers or wealth—those talismans—that is to make a senseless assimilation which kills equality in the bud and prevents human order from having a basis. Inheritance, which is the concrete and palpable form of tradition, defends itself by the tradition of origins and of beliefs—abuses defended by abuses, to infinity—and it is by reason of that integral succession that here, on earth, we see a few men holding the multitude of men in their hands. ”

“ An 'inherited drill,' science says, 'makes modern nations what they are; their born structure bears the trace of the laws of their fathers;' but the ancient nations came into no such inheritance; they were the descendants of people who did what was right in their own eyes; they were born to no tutored habits, no preservative bonds, and therefore they were at the mercy of every impulse and blown by every passion. ”

“ But like every other inheritance it must be kept up by effort similar to that which created it or it will be lost for ever to us as it seems now to be lost to the women of India, of Greece, of Rome, of Gaul, of Germany, of England, who can be proved to have once possessed it proportionally with ourselves, and from the same causes,—the virtue and high spirit of the primitive maidens and wives of each nation. ”

“ The ancient law-givers attached, indeed, a very high importance to lineage, as is proved by all those restrictive laws on marriage, which were destined to preserve the purity of descent; but they set a far higher value on the patrimonial inheritance of ancient customs, institutions, doctrines, and intellectual qualities, as constituting the true essence of national character, and determining the rank which one race should hold above another. ”

“ The ordinary facts of inheritance illustrate continuity of causation—very conspicuously where varieties so distinct as negro and white are united, and where traces of the negro come out generation after generation ”

“ The history of the race could no otherwise be communicated, or retained; but what genius could be expected in a poet by inheritance?
The nation was wholly illiterate. Neither bards nor Senachies could write or read; but if they were ignorant, there was no danger of detection; they were believed by those whose vanity they flattered.
The recital of genealogies, which has been considered as very efficacious to the preservation of a true series of ancestry, was anciently made, when the heir of the family came to manly age. ”

“ It is certain that old customs, especially those of inheritance, were very persistent, and are exemplified by the survival until the present day of many ancient manorial usages. Various customs of inheritance on the Continent can be traced back to the most ancient legal codes which arose out of the primitive folk-laws, and some of these still exist. ”

“ The inquiry into one's ancestry would thus answer a nobler purpose than the gratification of human vanity, or the recovery of an alienated inheritance; it would exhibit the influence of the past upon the present, afford important lessons of encouragement or admonition, and discover our claim perhaps, to something better than gold or silver "for the good man" even though he is poor, "leaveth an inheritance to his children's children." ”

“ Historically, the scientific interest in the question of biological and social inheritance has concerned itself with the rather sterile problem of the weight to be attached on the one hand to physical heredity and on the other to social heritage. The selection, "Temperament, Tradition, and Nationality" suggests that a more important inquiry is to determine how the behavior patterns and the culture of a racial group or a social class are determined by the interaction of original nature and the social tradition. ”

“ Partible inheritance is a custom which was very widely spread in the ancient world, and it is only by considering the other customs which were incidental to it in any country or locality, and by a comparison of these incidental customs with those in other countries or localities, that its probable origin can be traced. ”

“ There had been a wondrous involution from centuries of great history, according to subtle, silent laws of hereditary inheritance, in very blood and life, of tone, and quality, and temper, and now there is evolved, evoked, just that of power which tells of kinship with those who have gone before. ”

“ A new race, working out its own destiny in new conditions, cannot hope for the moral and intellectual maturity of a race seated at the cross-roads of the old civilisations. But America has, in part at least, a claim on the great general inheritance of Western culture. She inherits France through England, and Rome and the Mediterranean culture, through France. ”

“ Most of every man's heredity is hidden in the mist and darkness of the past. He inherits more or less directly through an infinite number of ancestors, reaching back to primitive man and even to the animals from which he came. The remote ancestry is, of course, usually not so important as that immediately behind him. Still, plainly, his form and structure and the details of his whole machine, including the marvelously delicate mechanism of the brain and nervous system, are heritages of the very ancient past. Neither are the processes of inheritance well understood nor subject to much control. ”

“ Tradition is a precious heritage, and the traditions of other nations should be the natural inheritance of the American child, since here as nowhere else all the nations of the earth are entering into our national life. ”

“ And this signified that in character, as well as in nature, the race was a unity; the past made the present, the heir became as his inheritance; and so any change in man had to be effected by the Maker and not by those He had made. ”

“ In other words, the young folk present not only an individual continuity with their organic predecessors which is heredity proper, but with their social predecessors also. The elements of organic continuity, which we usually think of first of all as organic though of course psychic also, are conveniently distinguished as the inheritance—a term in fact which the biologist seeks to deprive of its common economic and social senses altogether, leaving for these the term heritage, material or immaterial alike. ”

“ And here arises the ever recurring question of thought-sharing between the most widely removed of the earlier human races. How did early Peruvians and far-off Latins think in the same forms, and how did they come to select certain ones as the best, and cleave to them as a common inheritance? But leaving the puzzle of design and returning to the cross-stitch, which was its first interpretation or medium, and to the little Puritans who shared its acquaintance and practice with the women of all ages, we may see how the New England sampler opened the door of inheritance. ”

“ The idea of heredity has made familiar the notion that the equipment of the individual, mental as well as physical, is an inheritance from the race: a capital inherited by the individual from the past and held in trust by him for the future. ”

“ Let us be loyal to our inheritance and tradition, but let us understand what that inheritance 343and tradition truly is. It is not our tradition to stick to an outworn past, a conventional ideal, a rigid religion. We are children of men who have not been afraid of new continents or new ideas. ”

“ Never can we so worthily and appropriately honor them, as to cherish the pious sentiments which they cherished, and perpetuate the civil and religious institutions which they founded.—It is due to the generation of our Revolutionary era, which, impressed with a sense of the value of the inheritance transmitted to them, periled life and fortune that they might transmit that inheritance in all its fullness and in all its richness to their posterity. ”

“ Ethnography is required to bridge over the gap between the two, a very chasm where the arguments of moralists and legists are continually falling in, to crawl out maimed and helpless. Within modern grades of civilization this historical method is now becoming more and more accepted. It will not be denied that English law has acquired, by modified inheritance from past ages, a theory of primogeniture and a theory of real estate which are so far from being products of our own times that we must go back to the middle ages for anything like a satisfactory explanation of them ”

“ Nor does this by any means oust from the Canadian mind the interest of the ordinary problems of European anthropology. The complex succession of races which makes up the pedigree of the modern Englishman and Frenchman, where the descendants perhaps of palæolithic, and certainly of neolithic, man have blended with invading Keltic, Roman, Teutonic-Scandinavian peoples—all this is the inheritance of settlers in America as much as of their kinsfolk who have staid in Europe. ”

“ Whilst, however, we dwell upon the analogy which exists between the phenomena of the organic world and the phenomena of human culture, we must not omit to notice the points of difference. The force of inheritance may resemble in its effects the principle of conservatism in the arts and culture of mankind, but they are totally dissimilar causes. ”

“ To the mass of these latter, at any rate, we are none of us indebted for our brains or our aptitudes of thought and feeling, and the circumstance of our being joint sharers with them in patrimony bequeathed by a common ancestry, affords no very obvious reason why our share of the inheritance, together with whatever else we possess, should be at their absolute disposal. ”

“ It is not only the dukedom and the estates that have come to us from our ancestors. We have inherited other things—blood, instincts, passions, everything that makes the difference between one man and another. And that inheritance has been unfairly divided, too. ”

“ Generally, then, who is eligible for the social inheritance? This heir to society we are, all of us. Society does not make a will, it is true; nor does society die intestate. To say that it is we who inherit the riches of the social past of the race, is to say that we are the children of the past in a sense which comes upon us with all the force that bears in upon the natural heir when he finds his name in will or law. ”

“ Civilization largely sets aside the harsh but ultimately salutary action of the great law of Natural Selection without providing an efficient substitute for preventing degeneracy. The substitute on which moralists and legislators rely—if they think on the matter at all—is the cumulative inheritance of the beneficial effects of education, training, habits, institutions, and so forth—the inheritance, in short, of acquired characters, or of the effects of use and disuse. ”

“ The changes in organization are directly and most intimately connected with hereditary influences. The effects of such changes through the laws of inheritance are so great and far-reaching that they can not be described or measured. Judging from a physiological stand-point, the introduction of this foreign element into New England, instead of proving a blessing, may result in one of the greatest misfortunes that ever befell any race or people. ”

“ Neither are shooting with bows or kindling fire with firedrills inherited. Yet, such are the elements that constitute culture-complexes. It appears, then, that the form and direction the development of culture takes is something of another sort from that followed by organic evolution, because the perpetuating mechanism is not the same. Further, the knowledge we now possess of culture prohibits any fundamental distinctions in this respect between, say, the Eskimo and the English, for in neither case is the particular form of culture perpetuated by direct inheritance. ”

“ Small or great as may be the ordered and verified knowledge accumulated by the students of organic inheritance, there can be no question of the mere massiveness and quantity of our knowledge of social inheritance and social variation—in a word, of social evolution. ”

“ The fact is that we none of us know enough regarding the qualities of our ancestors to be justified in imputing our inheritance of any special tendency to any particular one of them, and every successive generation implies a mixing, if not a blending, of very complex and sometimes opposing qualities. ”

“ It is thus that we, who have derived so rich an inheritance from the toils, the attempts, and even the failures of our ancestors, may, in our turn, labour to lay up a store for our descendants which shall make them nobler, wiser, and more enlightened than ourselves; thus, that each generation may rise superior to those which have gone before ”

“ You have an inheritance acquired by the labors and sufferings of six successive generations of ancestors. They founded the fabric of your prosperity in a severe and masculine morality, having intelligence for its cement, and religion for its groundwork. Continue to build on the same foundation, and by the same principles let the extending temple of your country's freedom rise in the spirit of ancient times, in proportions of intellectual and moral architecture,—just, simple, and sublime. ”

“ I have powerful reasons for believing that an immense inheritance must, at no very distant period, be divided between the members of my family, all of whom I do not know—for, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, those from whom we are descended were dispersed in foreign countries, and experienced a great variety of fortunes. ”

“ The growth of the social heritage, rather than changes in the racial heritage, has wrought civilization for us and bridged the gap between aboriginal Teuton and modern German. Mankind may have progressed, certainly has altered, but for cause we must look to "those contrivances which enable human beings to advance independently of heredity." ”