Intelligence Tests and Achievements in Schools

There is just as much reason for saying that the instincts are neutral and that the environment makes vices or virtues out of them, as that instincts determine the result. Neither position is in fact, tenable, and the names and phrases cited above are descriptive of the combined effects of nature and nurture. "Characteristics, as such," as Jennings has recently stated with great clarity and convincingness "are not inherited at all, what one inherits is a certain material that under certain conditions will produce a particular characteristic; if those conditions are not supplied, some other characteristic is produced." The influence of a given home may make, in the case of a certain native equipment, a vicious outcome likely; even society at its best may in the rare case by ill-ordered for the functioning of some inheritable factors as that resulting in oversexedness; for its should be noted that this is a name not of the inheritable factor alone but of a condition to which both nature and environment are contributory.