INERTIA AS RELATED TO HEREDITY 83 



days tending sheep, but he was compelled to rear 

 the Florentine Campanile and portray all the 

 horrors of hell upon the plaster of the Pisan Campo 

 Santo. Michael Angelo was to have sat at a 

 lawyer's desk, but he dashed aside the quill to 

 make his chisel immortal ; young Galileo could not 

 become a physician because he had to reveal him- 

 self a mathematician, and Newton, trained to be a 

 gentleman-farmer, had to become the greatest 

 natural philosophical intellect which has ever been 

 embodied on this planet : certainly Grantham was 

 not responsible for it. Newton merely allowed 

 to develop amid, at first, alien surroundings, the 

 latent intellectual gigantism of his mental con- 

 stitution. What in ultimate analysis is genius but 

 that expression of character which is particularly 

 independent of the environment, and, if not in- 

 herited, can never be acquired ? Not that geniuses 

 do not possess affectability that is a totally 

 different point. We all know that geniuses are 

 peculiarly susceptible to the beauty of form or 

 of sound, the beauty of truth or the " beauty 

 of holiness," but it is equally true that they are 

 geniuses in spite of themselves, as it were, because 

 their very existence is the outcome of bioplasmie 

 inertia carrying over a particular molecular con- 

 stitution from the generation before them to their 

 own. Poeta nascitur, non fit subsumes it all; in the 

 nascitur we have the positive side of functional 

 inertia in inheritance, in the non fit we have the 

 negative aspect, the uselessness of environmental 



