350 NATURE AND LIFE. 
tion of his own will. Such lists would be endless, because, 
contrary to the opinion of those who advocate absolute 
heredity, it is innateness, it is personal activity, which is 
the general rule in the unfolding of mind. On the whole 
(and this is an essential point), heredity has its root in in- 
nateness ; for, after all those aptitudes and those qualities 
which ancestors transmit, beginning at a certain fixed time 
and for a longer or shorter continuance, to their descend- 
ants, these very aptitudes and qualities necessarily come to 
birth at such time through the spontaneous effort of a more 
or less independent will. On the one hand, we are bid to 
notice hysterical, epileptic, and insane people; and, on the 
other, painters, musicians, and poets, who evidently get 
from their parents the activity, in doing well or ill, which 
characterizes them. ‘True, doubtless, but the point is now 
to learn whence the parents themselves in their turn got 
it, and whether we must not rest in our retrospective ex- 
amination of ancestry at some point at which innateness 
was sovereign. This supremacy is the less disputable, in- 
asmuch as it soon reappears too in the descendants. ‘The 
effects of heredity come to an end, just as they once made 
a beginning. At the outset they prevail over innateness, 
whose influence they suspend; then they run out, and the 
latter regains its rights. Thus innateness is the enduring 
and continuous force, while heredity is the intermittent 
and perishing force. Human nature, studied in its course 
through ages, is a succession cf free souls, the more free 
in the degree that they have less need, for will and action, 
of aid from mechanical or organic powers. When they do 
need any such aid, they resign a part of their innate lib- 
erty to the sway of the blind influences of heredity. Yet, 
even with respect to the origin of esthetic aptitudes, in- 
nateness keeps its predominance. 
In the study of the history of famous men, how number- 
less are the instances we find of marvelous memories, glow- 
