344 - NATURE AND LIFE. 
merely the impress of the corporeal form of our fathers, 
but their thoughts and dispositions too! That drop of 
fluid, where does it find room for that infinite multitude of 
forms? and how does it carry those resemblances in so 
strange and irregular a course that the great-grandson will 
answer to the great-grandfather, the nephew to the uncle ? ” 
Montaigne’s amazement is reasonable, nor do we under- 
stand any better now than they did in the sixteenth cen- 
tury the causes of these singular transmissions. 
Such are the facts. We should in vain attempt to get 
rid of their character by multiplying their number, or by 
reasoning upon them. In the region of psychology, the 
instances of heredity will never be any thing but excep- 
tions, compared with those that stand for the opposite. 
Now, if they are exceptions, by what right can heredity be 
set up as the general law of development of intellectual 
action? By what right is it asserted that in this matter 
heredity is the rule, and non-heredity the exception? Ri- 
bot piles up the most ingenious arguments to prop up that 
singular proposition, but he wastes his time and ability in 
it. Any fashion of explaining how the heredity of intel- 
Jectual aptitudes is almost uniformly overcome by opposing 
or disturbing causes, does not make it out as overcoming 
them. Whatever ingenious reasons may be found for con- 
solation because the fancied sovereignty of heredity is 
seen to be brought down in the nature of things to a very 
limited control, they do not enlarge that control. In a 
word, if in fact non-heredity does have a far greater power 
and sway than heredity, the question is, Why does Ribot 
adopt a formula that implies the reverse ? 
Moreover, does not the spectacle of the development of 
civilization by itself alone clearly prove the dominant effi- 
cacy, in man’s bosom, of a permanent tendency toward 
transformation, innovation, change? Unalterableness in 
thoughts and permanence in habits were the law of primi- 
