74 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



recent work on heredity observes that the intelligence, 

 sentiments, instincts, and the organism generally, 

 being all transmissible, the individual " I " is obviously 

 a resulting quantity and not a mysterious and sepa- 

 rate creation.^ 



The last serious opponent of the law of moral 

 heredity was Buckle, the historian of civilisation, 

 whose philosophy has been proved to be more in- 

 genious than sound. Buckle contended that proof of 

 hereditary talent, hereditary vice, or hereditary virtue, 

 could only be furnished by an untrustworthy method 

 of induction. To point to the existence of certain 

 qualities in a father and a son, and to argue that there 

 was a necessary connexion between them, was a mode 

 of reasoning, he declared, by which it would be pos- 

 sible to demonstrate any proposition whatever. No 

 doubt ! But if the particular qualities of a man re- 

 appear in his son with greater certainty and regularity 

 than they do in the son of his friend, the presumption 



^ "Si I'intelligence, les sentiments, les instincts, I'organisme, 

 sufRsent a expliquer la personalite, nous n'avons aucune raison 

 d'admettre que I'heredite est limitee par quoi que ce soit. Sans 

 doute les caracteres nous offrent une diversite iniinie, mais les ele- 

 ments intellectuels, affectifs, vitaux, peuvent s'associer, de tant de 

 manieres, dans des proportions si variees, que les differences s'ex- 

 pliquent tout aussi bien par eux, que par I'hypoth^se d'une entity 

 mysterieuso et transcendante." — Ribot, VUiriditi Psychologique. 



