350 NATURE AND LIFE. 



tion of his own will. Such lists would be endless, because, 

 contrary to the opinion of those who advocate absolute 

 heredity, it is innateness, it is personal activity, which is 

 the general rule in the unfolding of mind. On the whole 

 (and this is an essential point), heredity has its root in in- 

 nateness ; for, after all those aptitudes and those qualities 

 which ancestors transmit, beginning at a certain fixed time 

 and for a longer or shorter continuance, to their descend- 

 ants, these very aptitudes and qualities necessarily come to 

 birth at such time through the spontaneous effort of a more 

 or less independent will. On the one hand, we are bid to 

 notice hysterical, epileptic, and insane people ; and, on the 

 other, painters, musicians, and poets, who evidently get 

 from their parents the activity, in doing well or ill, which 

 characterizes them. True, doubtless, but the point is now 

 to learn whence the parents themselves in their turn got 

 it, and whether we must not rest in our retrospective ex- 

 amination of ancestry at some point at which innateness 

 was sovereign. This supremacy is the less disputable, in- 

 asmuch as it soon reappears too in the descendants. The 

 effects of heredity come to an end, just as they once made 

 a beginning. At the outset they prevail over innateness, 

 whose influence they suspend ; then they run out, and the 

 latter regains its rights. Thus innateness is the enduring 

 and continuous force, while heredity is the intermittent 

 and perishing force. Human nature, studied in its course 

 through ages, is a succession of free souls, the more free 

 in the degree that they have less need, for will and action, 

 of aid from mechanical or organic powers. When they do 

 need any such aid, they resign a part of their innate lib- 

 erty to the sway of the blind influences of heredity. Yet, 

 even with respect to the origin of aesthetic aptitudes, in- 

 nateness keeps its predominance. 



In the study of the history of famous men, how number- 

 less are the instances we find of marvelous memories, glow- 



