So Heredity, Variation and Genius 



and altruistic development of the species, and 

 spasmodic outbursts of hysteria are fundamentally 

 the morbid outcomes of social feeling. No such 

 outbursts of delirious sentimentalities would occur 

 were there no social atmosphere to stimulate and 

 feed them. Individual life is not of value by it- 

 self ; it gains value only by its attachment to the 

 life of a social whole, and larger value by its 

 attachment to a larger social whole — to the family, 

 to the particular social body, to the nation, to 

 humanity in ascending series. 



Nature is wise enough, however, not to upset 

 the balance of sane life by permitting neurotic 

 extremes to propagate their kind by hereditary 

 transmission of disproportionate qualities ; the 

 exaggerated egoism, whatever its line of growth, 

 being a deformity or morbid hypertrophy which 

 is apt in the following generation to issue in an 

 antisocial type — criminal, idiotic, insane or other- 

 wise degenerate — tending to extinction. Absence 

 of order, harmony and proportion of thought and 

 feeling in the mental structure of the parent is 

 thus naturally apt to produce an innate predis- 

 position to disorder in the offspring, or at all 

 events in some of them, not necessarily in all. 

 Even the sane genius is not granted the privilege 

 of propagation and continuance of its exceptional 

 self ; the rule of a steady return to the mean, 

 enforcing a distribution of the accumulated capital, 

 checks that hurt to the equilibrium of the species. 

 Thus a sort of vis medicatrix naturce works in the 



