Chapter 3

No attempt is made in this book to deal with the transmission of ability of the very highest order, as the data in hand do not furnish the required material, nor will the conclusions be re-examined at length that I published many years ago in "Hereditary Genius." Still, some explanation is desirable to show the complexity of the conditions that are concerned with the hereditary transmission of the highest ability, which, for the moment, will be considered as the same thing as the highest fame.

It has often been remarked that the men who have attained pinnacles of celebrity failed to leave worthy successors, if any. Many concurrent causes aid in producing this result. An obvious one is that such persons are apt to be so immersed in their pursuit, and so wedded to it, that they do not care to be distracted by a wife. Another is the probable connection between severe mental strain and fertility. Women who study hard have, as a class--at least, according to observant caricaturists--fewer of the more obvious feminine characteristics; but whether this should be considered a cause or a consequence, or both, it is difficult to say. A third, and I think the most important, reason why the children of very distinguished persons fall sometimes lamentably short of their parents in ability is that the highest order of mind results from a fortunate mixture of incongruous constituents, and not of such as naturally harmonize. Those constituents are _negatively_ correlated, and therefore the compound is unstable in heredity. This is eminently the case in the typical artistic temperament, which certainly harmonizes with Bohemianism and passion, and is opposed to the useful qualities of regularity, foresight, and level common sense. Where these and certain other incongruous faculties go together in well-adjusted proportions, they are capable of achieving the highest success; but their heritage is most unlikely to be transmitted in its entirety, and ill-balanced compounds of the same constituents are usually of little avail, and sometimes extraordinarily bad. A fourth reason is that the highest imaginative power is dangerously near lunacy. If one of the sanest of poets, Wordsworth, had, as he said, not unfrequently to exert strength, as by shaking a gate-post, to gain assurance that the world around him was a reality, his mind could not at those times have been wholly sane. Sanity is difficult to define, except negatively; but, even though we may be convinced of the truths of the mystic, that nothing is what it seems to be, the above-mentioned conduct suggests temporary insanity. It is sufficient to conclude, as any Philistine would, that whoever has to shake a gate-post to convince himself that it is not a vision is dangerously near madness. Mad people do such things; those who carry on the work of the world as useful and law-abiding citizens do not. I may add that I myself had the privilege of hearing at first hand the narrator's own account of this incident, which was much emphasized by his gestures and tones. Wordsworth's unexpected sally was in reply to a timid question by the late Professor Bonamy Price, then a young man, concerning the exact meaning of the lines in his famous "Ode to Immortality," "not for these I raise the song of praise; but for those obstinate _questionings of sense and outward things_," etc.

I cannot speak from the present returns, but only from my own private knowledge of the somewhat abnormal frequency with which eccentricity, or other mental unsoundness, occurs in the families of very able scientific men. Lombroso, as is well known, strongly asserted the truth of this fact, but more strongly, as it seems to myself, than the evidence warrants.

It is, therefore, not in the highest examples of human genius that heredity can be most profitably studied, men of high, but not of the highest, ability being more suitable. The only objection to their use is that their names are, for the most part, unfamiliar to the public.

The vastness of the social world is very imperfectly grasped by its several members, the large majority of the numerous persons who have been eminent above their far more numerous fellows, each in his own special department, being unknown to the generality. The merits of such men can be justly appreciated only by reference to records of their achievements. Let no reader be so conceited as to believe his present ignorance of a particular person to be a proof that the person in question does not merit the title of noteworthy.

I said what I have to say about the modern use of the word "genius" in the preface to the second edition of my "Hereditary Genius." It has only latterly lost its old and usual meaning, which is preserved in the term of an "ingenious" artisan, and has come to be applied to something akin to inspiration. This simply means, as I suppose, though some may think differently, that the powers of unconscious work possessed by the brain are abnormally developed in them. The heredity of these powers has not, I believe, been as yet especially studied. It is strange that more attention has not been given until recently to unconscious brain-work, because it is by far the most potent factor in mental operations. Few people, when in rapid conversation, have the slightest idea of the particular form which a sentence will assume into which they have hurriedly plunged, yet through the guidance of unconscious cerebration it develops itself grammatically and harmoniously. I write on good authority in asserting that the best speaking and writing is that which seems to flow automatically shaped out of a full mind.