158 Heredity. ‘April, 
of his own character. Genius, heroism, crime, insanity, 
every exuberance, every deficiency, and every aberration of 
our inner life, are self-caused,—coming into existence without 
any regular and unvarying antecedents. Let us take as a 
specimen the following passage, which M. Ribot quotes 
from Heinroth :— 
‘‘ Insanity is the loss of moral freedom ; it never depends 
on a physical cause; it is not a disease of the body, but a 
disease of the mind, a sin. It neither is nor can be heredi- 
tary, because the thinking ego—the soul—is not hereditary. 
What is transmissible by way of generation is temperament 
and constitution, and against these he must react whose 
parents were insane if he would not himself become lunatic. 
The man who, during his whole life, has before his eyes and 
in his heart the image of God, need never fear that he will 
ever lose his wits.” 
It is scarcely necessary to say that if we admit this hypo- 
thesis we must, to be consequent, reject not this or the 
other of the teachings of Science, but abandon altogether 
the scientific spirit and the scientific method. We may not 
be able to foresee—as we predict a solar eclipse or a transit 
of Venus—whether or no a newly-born child will prove a 
genius. The laws involved are beyond our present grasp ; 
possibly altogether beyond the powers of the human in- 
tellect. But if we maintain that the result is independent 
of law we may as well deny the conservation of force, 
question the axiom that like antecedents will be followed by 
like consequents, and abandon our faith in the uniformity of 
Nature. For us, then, Science has no longer any existence. 
But the advocates of the hypothesis assert that man makes 
himself a genius, a lunatic, an idiot, a criminal, or a 
common-place citizen, in virtue of his own ‘free will,’—an 
explanation which is far from mending their case. Not 
being either a Calvinist or a fallen angel* we shall not enter 
into such regions. To pursue a metaphysician into that 
Serbonian bog is as bootless as to chase a Cateran into his 
own wilderness. Still we may remark that this free-will 
view leaves the question unaffected. The difficulty, like a 
sturdy beggar in some parts of Germany, is merely 
‘‘ abgeschoben,”—laid on a barrow and wheeled into the 
next parish. Why should the “will” of John produce 
effects which the will of Thomas does not, except there be 
in the two some difference, innate or connate ? And whence 
springs this difference? Is it, too, self-caused? How, 
* Milton happily represents his devils debating on free will. 
