352 NATURE AND LIFE. 



The case in which innateness seems especially trium- 

 phant is that of the philosophers. The authors give no lists 

 of philosophers who inherited from their forefathers apti- 

 tudes for speculation. There is here a series of expressly 

 negative facts which they pass over in silence, and to which 

 sufficient attention is not usually paid. Metaphysicians, 

 precisely because the spiritual element alone works in them, 

 are freed from all influences of hereditary predestination. 

 That loses its energy just in proportion as there is occasion 

 for transmitting such qualities as are less physiological 

 and more psychological. Now, what can be more psycho- 

 logical, what more free from elements mixed with sense, and 

 factors that work mechanically, than the mind of a specula- 

 tive philosopher ? In truth, great metaphysicians had no an- 

 cestors, and have left no posterity. The philosophic genius 

 has always appeared completely individual, inalienable, and 

 untransmissible. There is not a single renowned thinker in 

 whose ascending or descending line can be found the warn- 

 ing forerunner or {he reminder of the eminent capabilities 

 that made his fame. Descartes and Newton, Leibnitz and 

 Spinoza, Diderot and Hume, Kant and Maine du Biran, 

 Cousin and Jouffroy, have neither ancestors nor posterity. 



Such is innateness. To estimate exactly its function, 

 we should need to ascertain in a general way and in its re- 

 lations with the temperament, the training, the cosmic and 

 social medium, etc., the production and development of those 

 capacities by which some man of a high order is clearly 

 differenced from his ancestors ; and we should need to 

 bring into one view, and as far as possible to coordinate, 

 those characteristic elements which make up the very es- 

 sence of personality and of individuality, those elements 

 of bold departure from the beaten track, of plenary self- 

 dependence, so mighty and so amazing, by which genius 

 asserts itself. We should then see how, in almost all in- 

 stances, eminent capacities are so inmost to those who dis- 



