388 Heredity. 



A categorical answer is impossible at present Hitherto man 

 has thought more of perfecting other races than his own, probably 

 from ignorance of natural laws. Yet we may affirm, on the 

 strength of an incontestable calculation of probabilities, that 

 parents of superior mental ability are likely to produce intellectual 

 children, and that, however numerous the deviations and anomalies 

 (and we have seen that numerous they must be), still since among 

 facts of the same order, depending in part on constant, and in part 

 on variable causes, law must at last carry the day a conscious 

 selection, carried on for a long time, would have good results. 

 But the race so formed could never be left to itself, for, not to 

 speak of atavism, which would bring back abruptly mental forms 

 apparently extinct, we know that heredity always tends to revert 

 to the primitive type, or, to speak without metaphor, what was 

 acquired but recently possesses little stability ; perhaps, too, these 

 selected constitutions resemble those very unstable compounds 

 which it is very difficult to fix. 



We do not know what man was originally, nor can we tell what 

 he yet will be. But compare for a moment the state of nature 

 with that of the highest civilization. Compare the almost naked 

 savage, his brain filled with images and void of ideas, with his 

 rude speech and his fetiches a man associated with nature, living 

 her life, and forming one with her with the man that is very remote 

 from nature, highly civilized, highly refined initiated into all the 

 niceties of art, literature, and science, all the elegancies and all 

 the complexities of social life, and practising that maxim of 

 Goethe, Strive to understand thyself and to understand all things 

 beside. The distance between these two extremes appears infinite, 

 and yet it has been travelled over step by step. No doubt this 

 evolution the result of the complex play of numerous causes is 

 not due exclusively to heredity; but we have succeeded ill with our 

 task if the reader does not now see that it has contributed largely 

 to bringing it about. 



II. 



Quitting now experience, though not forgetting it, we will 

 endeavour to trace back the law of heredity to some more general 

 law which shall explain it Whatever may be thought of the 



