Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/497



The facts now set forth prove the existence of a number of mental faculties which either do not exist at all or exist in a very rudimentary condition in savages, but appear almost suddenly and in perfect development in the higher civilised races. These same faculties are further distinguished by their sporadic character, being well developed only in a very small proportion of the community; and by the enormous amount of variation in their development, the higher manifestations of them being many times—perhaps a hundred or a thousand times—stronger than the lower. Each of these characteristics is totally inconsistent with any action of the law of natural selection in the production of the faculties referred to; and the facts, taken in their entirety, compel us to recognise some origin for them wholly distinct from that which has served to account for the animal characteristics—whether bodily or mental—of man. under the law of natural selection. He says: "It may be objected that, in man, in addition to the instincts inherent in every individual, special individual predispositions are also found, of such a nature that it is impossible they can have arisen by individual variations of the germ-plasm. On the other hand, these predispositions—which we call talents—cannot have arisen through natural selection, because life is in no way dependent on their presence, and there seems to be no way of explaining their origin except by an assumption of the summation of the skill attained by exercise in the course of each single life. In this case, therefore, we seem at first sight to be compelled to accept the transmission of acquired characters." Weismann then goes on to show that the facts do not support this view; that the mathematical, musical, or artistic faculties often appear suddenly in a family whose other members and ancestors were in no way distinguished; and that even when hereditary in families, the talent often appears at its maximum at the commencement or in the middle of the series, not increasing to the end, as it should do if it depended in any way on the transmission of acquired skill. Gauss was not the son of a mathematician, nor Handel of a musician, nor Titian of a painter, and there is no proof of any special talent in the ancestors of these men of genius, who at once developed the most marvellous pre-eminence in their respective talents. And after showing that such great men only appear at certain stages of human development, and that two or more of the special talents are not unfrequently combined in one individual, he concludes thus—

"Upon this subject I only wish to add that, in my opinion, talents do not appear to depend upon the improvement of any special mental quality by continued practice, but they are the expression, and to a certain extent the bye-product, of the human mind, which is so highly developed in all directions."

It will, I think, be admitted that this view hardly accounts for the existence of the highly peculiar human faculties in question.