Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 July 1891 — Is Culture Hereditary? [ARTICLE]

Is Culture Hereditary?

The whole point at issue is whether there is a casual relation between the cultivation of the mental faculties and their development; in other words, whether the increment gained by their exercise is transmitted to posterity. Professor Weismann and most of hiis followers, constituting what is generally known as the school of Neo-Dar-winians, deny such transmission. If they are light, education has no value for the future of mankind, and its benefits are confined exclusively to the generation receiving it. So far as the inculcation of the knowledge is concerned, this has always been admitted to be the case, and the fact that each new individual must begin at the baginning and acquire all knowledge over again for himself is sufficiently discouraging and has often been deplored. But the belief, though vague, has been somewhat general that a part at least of what is gained in the direction of developing and strengthening the faculties of the mind, thiough their life-long exercise in special fields, is permanently preserved to the race by hereditary transmission to posteiity of the ac quired increment. We have seen that, all the facts of history and of personal observation sustain this comforting popular belief, and until the doctors of science shall cease to differ on this point and shall reduce the laws of heredity to a degree of exactness which shall amount to something more like a demonstration than the current speculations, it may perhaps be as well to continue for a time to hug the delusion.