526 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



grounds ? Novelists have rung the changes on this intrusion of 

 the social into the physiological cycle. What is Bourget's Cos- 

 mopolis but a picture of the inlSuence of social race characteristics 

 on natural heredity, with the reaction of natural heredity again 

 upon new social conditions ? 



A speech of a character of Balzac's is to the point, as illustrat- 

 ing a certain appreciation of these social considerations which we 

 all to a degree entertain. The Duchesse de Carigliano says to 

 Madame de Sommervieux : " I know the world too well, my dear, 

 to abandon myself to the discretion of a too superior man. You 

 should know that one may allow them to court one, but marry 

 them — that is a mistake ! Never — no, no. It is like wanting to 

 find pleasure in inspecting the machinery of the opera instead of 

 sitting in a box to enjoy its brilliant illusions." To be sure, we 

 do not generally deliberate in this wise when we fall in love : but 

 that is not necessary, since our social milieu sets the style by the 

 kind of intangible deliberation which I have called judgment and 

 fitness. Suppose a large number of Northern advocates of social 

 equality should migrate to the Southern States, and, true to their 

 theory, intermarry with the blacks. Would it not then be true 

 that a social consideration had run athwart the physiological 

 " cycle," in the production of a legitimate mulatto society ? A 

 whole race might spring from a purely psychological or social 

 initiation. "Sexual selection" is certainly a principle of broad 

 biological application in human affairs. 



I agree, however, with the hero- worshiper so far as to say that 

 we can not set the limitations of the genius on the side of vari- 

 ations in intellectual endowment. So, if the general position be 

 true that he is a variation of some kind, we must seek somewhere 

 else for the direction of those peculiar traits whose excess would 

 be his condemnation. This we can only find in connection with 

 the other demand that we make of the ordinary man — i. e., the 

 demand that he be a man of good judgment. And to this we 

 may finally turn. 



In approaching this topic it is well to bear in mind a further 

 result which follows from the reciprocal character of social rela- 

 tionships. If the man in question have thoughts which are so- 

 cially true, he will, ipso facto, know that they are true. He is a 

 social outcome as well as are the fellows who sit in judgment on 

 him. He must judge his own thoughts, too, as they do. So his 

 own proper estimate of things and thoughts, his relative sense of 

 fitness, gets application by a direct law of his own mental processes 

 to himself and to his own creations. The limitations which, in 

 the judgment of society, his variations must not overstep, are 

 set by his own judgment also. So we reach the conclusion re- 

 garding the intellectual variations which the genius may have : 



