Culture of Personality Author:John Herman Randall Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE BEGINNINGS OF PERSONALITY jHETHER we believe it practically or not, our sublime faith in human nature is bound up in the thought that every child is ... more »a child of God, and therefore that all men are, or should be, born free and equal; and the hope of human progress lies in the fact that all men share in the possibilities of a common destiny. This destiny, as we have already seen, lies in the direction of the development of personality. If you deny that the black man or the yellow man is capable of such development, if you hold that the Caucasian or the Anglo-Saxon is alone able to achievepersonality; if you despise the others as being only beasts of burden, or kill them outright as hindrances in the way of civilization, then it is only a question of time when the logic of such treatment will inevitably undermine the boasted dignities of the most elect race or the most select class. To deny the divine possibilities of personality for any other human being, is to fall just that far short oneself, of becoming a true personality. If we were to attempt to trace all the influences that contribute to the formation of the individual personality, we should have to begin with the parents of the child, and behind them with their parents, and so be led back into the complex, mysterious and subtle influences of ancestry. Here we confront a field so vast as to naturally require separate treatment. The newest of the sciences and the one least understood to-day is the science of Eugenics, or the science of being well-born. Our children's children will profit from this new knowledge as we cannot. Our wisest men, however, have come to see that all improvements of the race are only provisional, until we come to understand and apply the laws that make for race improvement. Nowhere is more...« less