344 NATURE AND LIFE. 



merely the impress of the corporeal form of our fathers, 

 but their thoughts and dispositions too ! That drop of 

 fluid, where does it find room for that infinite multitude of 

 forms? and how does it carry those resemblances in so 

 strange and irregular a course that the great-grandson will 

 answer to the great-grandfather, the nephew to the uncle ? " 

 Montaigne's amazement is reasonable, nor do we under- 

 stand any better now than they did in the sixteenth cen- 

 tury the causes of these singular transmissions. 



Such are the facts. We should in vain attempt to get 

 rid of their character by multiplying their number, or by 

 reasoning upon them. In the region of psychology, the 

 instances of heredity will never be any thing but excep- 

 tions, compared with those that stand for the opposite. 

 Now, if they are exceptions, by what right can heredity be 

 set up as the general law of development of intellectual 

 action ? By what right is it asserted that in this matter 

 heredity is the rule, and non-heredity the exception ? Ri- 

 bot piles up the most ingenious arguments to prop up that 

 singular proposition, but he wastes his time and ability in 

 it. Any fashion of explaining how the heredity of intel- 

 lectual aptitudes is almost uniformly overcome by opposing 

 or disturbing causes, does not make it out as overcoming 

 them. Whatever ingenious reasons may be found for con- 

 solation because the fancied sovereignty of heredity is 

 seen to be brought down in the nature of things to a very 

 limited control, they do not enlarge that control. In a 

 word, if in fact non-heredity does have a far greater power 

 and sway than heredity, the question is, Why does Ribot 

 adopt a formula that implies the reverse ? 



Moreover, does not the spectacle of the development of 

 civilization by itself alone clearly prove the dominant effi- 

 cacy, in man's bosom, of a permanent tendency toward 

 transformation, innovation, change? Unalterableness in 

 thoughts and permanence in habits were the law of primi- 



