146 THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE. 



psychic activity — in the possession of certain artistic 

 talents or inclinations, in force of character, and in 

 warmth of temperament ; not infrequently there is a 

 striking feature which neither parents nor grand- 

 parents possessed, but which may be traced a long 

 way back to an older branch of the family. Even in 

 these remarkable cases of atavism the same laws of 

 heredity apply to the psyche and to the physiognomy, 

 to the personal quality of the sense-organs, muscles, 

 skeleton, and other parts of the body. We can trace 

 them most clearly in reigning dynasties and in old 

 families of the nobility, whose conspicuous share in 

 the life of the State has given occasion to a more 

 careful historical picture of the individuals in the 

 chain of generations — for instance, in the Hohen- 

 zollerns, the princes of Orange, the Bourbons, etc., 

 and in the Roman Caesars. 



The causal nexus of biontic (individual) and phyletic 

 (historical) evolution, which I gave in my General 

 Morphology as the supreme law at the root of all 

 biogenetic research, has a universal application to 

 psychology no less than to morphology. I have fully 

 treated the special importance which it has with regard 

 to man, in both respects, in the first chapter of my 

 Anthropogeny. In man, as in all other organisms, 

 " the embryonic development is an epitome of the 

 historical development of the species. This condensed 

 and abbreviated recapitulation is the more complete in 

 proportion as the original epitomised development 

 {palingenesis) is preserved by a constant heredity ; on 

 the other hand, it falls off from completeness in pro- 

 portion as the later disturbing development (cenogenesis) 

 is accentuated by varying adaptation." 



While we apply this law to the evolution of the 



