44 Heredity, Variation and Genius 



of specialization apt to run into barren details. 

 The genius, however, would be little worth, an 

 ingenious speculator only, who, unresponsive to 

 outside influences, did not absorb and merge into 

 himself all the special values, present and pre- 

 existent, and fuse them into the excellent varia- 

 tional outcome. He is one with Nature, and his 

 achievement is Nature fulfilled through him, 

 because he is susceptible to every external 

 stimulus which educes the capacity and conduces 

 to the complete development of a richly endowed 

 being ; expressing finally when and as he can, 

 concentrated in defined form of art or invention, 

 the distilled essence of the crude material which 

 he has consciously and unconsciously imbibed. 

 Into the superior protoplasmic susceptibility of 

 his sympathetic brain steal imperceptibly the 

 subtile influences of surrounding Nature, inter- 

 working there — for the most part subconsciously — 

 to be projected outwards in forms of beauty and 

 invention. 



A second objection may be urged to the dogma 

 of the non-inheritance of acquired characters. 

 Whence comes the right to fix a complete dis- 

 tinction between the reproductive processes which 

 go on regularly in the organs and tissues of the 

 body with their several secretions and excretions 

 and the product of the whole similar reproduc- 

 tive process of the body, which is essentially an 

 overgrowth and, so to speak, excreted secretion 

 of it ? A secretion, that is, not used internally 



