98 ON HEREDITY. [II. 



and the appearance of different remarkable talents in the various 

 branches of one and the same family, indicate that talents are 

 only special combinations of certain highly-developed mental 

 dispositions which are found in every brain. Many painters 

 have been admirable musicians, and we very frequently find 

 both these talents developed to a slighter extent in a single 

 individual. In the Feuerbach family we find a distinguished 

 jurist, a remarkable philosopher, and a highly-talented artist ; 

 and among the Mendelssohns a philosopher as well as a 

 musician. 



The sudden and yet widespread appearance of a particular 

 talent in correspondence with the general intellectual excitement 

 of a certain epoch points in the same direction. How many poets 

 arose in Germany during the period of sentiment which marked 

 the close of the last century, and how completely all poetic 

 gifts seem to have disappeared during the Thirty Years' War. 

 How numerous were the philosophers that appeared in the 

 epoch which succeeded Kant ; while all philosophic talent 

 seemed to have deserted the German nation during the sway 

 of the antagonistic ' exact science,' with its contempt for 

 speculation. 



Wherever academies are founded, there the Schwanthalers, 

 Defreggers, and Lenbachs emerge from the masses which had 

 shown no sign of artistic endowment through long periods of 

 time ^. At the present day there are many men of science who, 

 had they lived at the time of Burger, Uhland, or Schelling, 

 would probably have been poets or philosophers. And the 

 man of science also cannot dispense with that mental disposi- 

 tion directed in a certain course, which we call talent, although 

 the specific part of it may not be so obvious : we may, indeed, 

 go further, and maintain that the physicist and the chemist are 

 characterized by a combination of mental dispositions which 

 differ from those of the botanist and the zoologist. Never- 

 theless, a man is not born a physicist or a botanist, and in most 

 cases chance alone determines whether his endowments are 

 developed in either direction. 



Lessing has asked whether Raphael would have been a less 

 distinguished artist had he been born without hands : we might 



\} The author refers to the Academy of Arts at Munich. S. S.] 



