3 14 Heredity. 



nature we despair of knowing, because it rests in the unfathom- 

 able depths of the unconscious do we at least know whence it is, 

 what is its origin ? 



Clearly, there can be but two hypotheses : either we must say 

 that at every birth there is an act of special creation, which places 

 in each being the germ of its character, of its personality ; or we 

 must admit that this germ is the product of preceding generations, 

 and that it necessarily comes from the nature of the parents and 

 from the circumstances of the generative act 



The first hypothesis is so unscientific that it is hardly worth 

 discussing. Hence we have to consider only the second. 

 / Here, then, we find ourselves at the very heart of the matter. 

 We imagined we were escaping from heredity, and now we meet 

 with it in that very germ which is the one thing in us which is 

 inmost, most essential and most personal. After having shown, by 

 a long enumeration of facts, that the sensitive and intellectual 

 faculties are transmitted that we may inherit an instinct, a 

 passion, a variety of imagination, as well as consumption, or 

 rickets, or long life we expected that at least one portion of 

 psychological life would be found to lie beyond the reach of deter- 

 minism, and that character, personality, the ego, would be found 

 Y exempt from the law of heredity. But heredity, or in other words 

 determinism, meets us on every side, from within and from without. 

 Nay, even if with the evolutionists we recognize in heredity a force 

 which not only preserves, but which also creates by accumulation, 

 then not only is the character transmitted, but it is the work of 

 fate, made up bit by bit, by the slow and unconscious but ever 

 accumulating toil of generations. The question becomes perfectly 

 inextricable an enigma within an enigma. 



We are not so simple as to attempt its solution. We touch here 

 upon that region of the unknowable to which every inquiry into 

 first causes inevitably leads. Here science ends, and it is as little 

 scientific to hold with the fatalists that there exists in the universe 

 only an absolute determinism, without exception, as to say with 

 their opponents that determinism is only a lower mode of ex- 

 istence, lying outside of and beneath free-will. Though the former 

 school may show very well that free-will is governed by fixed laws, 

 they can bring forward no fact to decide whether the final cause of 



