HEREDITY IN PHYSIOLOGY, IN MEDICINE, ETC. 349 



ropeans. Like children, they are natural mimics, and can- 

 not refrain from aping what is done in their presence. 

 Their mind supplies nothing that can resist that inclination 

 to imitate. Every enlightened man has within himself a 

 large reserve of ideas toward which he can turn his mind ; 

 that resource does not exist for the savage and the child. 

 The occurrences that take place before them are their pe- 

 culiar life. They live upon what they see and hear. They 

 are the sport of external things. In civilized nations, un- 

 cultivated people are in the same condition. Send a cham- 

 bermaid and a philosopher to a country of the language 

 of which both are ignorant, it is likely that the girl will 

 learn it before the philosopher does. He has something 

 else to do. He can live with his thoughts, but she, unless 

 she is talking, is lost. The instinct of imitation is in in- 

 verse ratio to the power of mental abstraction. 



We learn from these details that the potent and instinc- 

 tive force of doing as others do, which plays so great a part 

 in the education of persons and of races, differs wholly from 

 heredity. It may act, and it does act, concurrently with 

 hereditary impulses, but it works much oftener in an inde- 

 pendent and even a contrary fashion. This is quite as 

 true of another force, a bolder rival and stronger opponent 

 of heredity, the work of which is next to be studied : we 

 mean personality. 



Eminently the instrument of free invention, the unfail- 

 ing spring of the voluntary action that makes things new, 

 the individual personality of the soul, may be designated, 

 in opposition to the term heredity, by the name innateness. 

 To give an idea of the power of innateness as compared 

 with that of heredity, lists might be drawn up, containing 

 the instances in which the manifestation of various passions 

 or various talents does not proceed from ancestors, in which 

 the individual is born distinct from those who went before 

 him, or has made himself distinct from them by the reac- 



