154 Heredity. 



The foregoing observations may be thus summarized : In the 

 case of direct heredity the child derives its qualities from father 

 and mother. 

 ^ There is always a preponderance of one of these. 



It will, perhaps, be asked whether, after having treated the 

 question mainly from the physiological point of view, we ought 

 not now to take it up again from the psychological point of view, 

 and search history for facts in support of this first form of direct 

 heredity that is, for cases of persons who derived their qualities 

 from both father and mother. Such cases might be found. It 

 might be said that Alexander resembled Philip in some respects, 

 Olympias in others. Nero was the worthy son of Agrippina ; but 

 it is not to be forgotten that his father, Domitius Ahenobarbus, was 

 noted for his cruelty : he had one of his freedmen put to death for 

 refusing to drink to excess ; he purposely crushed to death a child 

 on the Appian Way ; and he was wont to say : ' Of me and 

 Agrippina nothing can be born that is not accursed.' Michelet 

 declares that Queen Elizabeth resembled both Henry VIII. and 

 Ann Boleyn. According to the same historian, the Duke de 

 Vendome was most like his mother, Gabrielle d'Estrees ; but in 

 his ' waggish look comes out his Gascon ancestry and the great 

 Be'arnais jester.' (Henri IV.) Schopenhauer, who explains the 

 question of heredity according to his metaphysical system, holds 

 that whatever is primary and fundamental in the individual 

 character, passions, tendencies is inherited from the father : the 

 intelligence, a secondary and derivative faculty, directly from the 

 mother. He was pleased to imagine that he found in his own 

 person the irrefutable evidence of this doctrine. Intellectual and 

 subtle like his mother, who had literary tastes and lived in 

 Goethe's circle at Weimar, he was, like his father, shy, obstinate, 

 intractable : he was a man of ' scowling mien, and of fantastic 

 judgments.' l 



It would not be difficult to multiply instances, but the labour 

 would be wholly useless ; for the question before us now is, not 

 whether the child derives its qualities from both father and mother 



1 Schopenhauer, Die Wdt als Wille und Vorstehung, vol. i. 23 ; vol. ii. 

 book iv. ch. 43. 



