Heredity of the Sentiments and tke\f}assions/S 85 



T ^?? 



be referred to these unconscious modes, which /underlie 'all/ epn- 

 scidusness and all thought 



Thus, families have been known in the members of which the J j, 

 smallest doses of opium produce a convulsive state. Zimmerrhafnrjf 

 speaks of a family on whom coffee had a soporific effect, acting- 

 like opium, while opium itself produced no effect Some families'^ 

 can hardly endure emetics, others purgative medicines, others 

 blood-letting. 



Montaigne, who took an interest in the question of heredity, 

 because he derived from his family a tendency to stone, inherited 

 also an invincible repugnance for medicine. 'The antipathy,' 

 he says, ' is hereditary. My father lived seventy-four years, my 

 grandfather sixty-nine, and my great-grandfather almost eighty, 

 and never tasted nor took any kind of physic, and for them any- 

 thing not in common use was a drug. My ancestors, by some 

 secret instinct and natural inclination, have ever loathed all 

 manner of physic the very sight of drugs was an abomination 

 to my father. The Seigneur de Gerviac, my paternal uncle, who 

 was an ecclesiastic, and sickly from birth, and who, notwith- 

 standing, made his weak life to hold out to the age of sixty-seven, 

 falling once into a high protracted fever, the physicians had word 

 sent to him that he must surely die if he would not take some 

 remedy. The good soul, affrighted as he was at this horrible 

 sentence, said, ' Then it is all over with me.' But God* soon after 

 made their prognostications to prove vain. Possibly I have re- 

 ceived from them my natural antipathy to physic,' l 



When, from the organic sensations diffused over the whole body, 

 we pass to the wants and inclinations which have their seat in a 

 special organ, it is easy to give indisputable instances of passions 

 hereditarily transmitted. This we propose to show with regard to 

 the three chief physical wants, viz. thirst, hunger, and the sexual 

 appetite. 



The passion known as dipsomania, or alcoholism, is so frequently 

 transmitted that all are agreed in considering its heredity as the 

 rule. Not, however, that the passion for drink is always trans- 

 mitted in that identical form, for it often degenerates into mania, 



1 Montaigne, Essays, ii. 37. 



