Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/204

192 tile mediums! What an important part, on the other hand, may have been played in the expansion of superior minds in certain favored families, by the influence of examples of the most delicate methods of investigation in questions of the natural sciences, by habituation to rigorous methods in the exact sciences! Who could in such cases separate what, in the working of such different influences, is attributable to education and what to heredity?

We must first leave out of the consideration genius, properly so called, which can not be included in any determinate category. At this point we meet the error which has vitiated Mr. Galton's whole work, and which is curiously illustrated in the title itself of his book, "Hereditary Genius." Genius is of all things not a phenomenon of heredity. It is precisely in what is extraordinary and exceptional in it—that is, in its essential quality—that genius escapes all our formulas. It is pre-eminently the abnormal phenomenon, the one that we can not reduce to its elements, or put into a classification, an irreducible formula, the resolution of which recognizes no law within the compass of human knowledge. At this point, certainly, Mr. Galton's lists betray their poverty; and he tries in vain to connect the lines of artists and scientific men with the illustrious genius who all at once bursts out from among them. Even in the musical family of the Bachs, which was distinguished for eight generations and through two centuries, we may count up all the examples of the special musical talent which appeared again and again in each generation; we may review all those gifted persons, the organists, the choir-singers, the choir-leaders, the city musicians, whether they be ancestors, sons, or grandsons; but we can find only one Sebastian Bach. Whence came that particular impulsion, that soaring force, that carried him to the very summit of inspiration? Why is it that he alone of the whole family could compose that marvelous series of preludes, fugues, and oratorios which stand as isolated monuments in the history of the great art? Why were none of the others like him? Mr. Galton's tables do not give us the key to this mystery; they simply reveal a transmission of the musical faculty, a community of aptitudes among the members of this family. But that which was not common to him with the others, that which made Sebastian Bach, is the thing we want explained, and it is precisely this that heredity does not explain. The aptitudes were transmitted like a patrimony, but the grand phenomenon of genius was the property of only one, and was produced but once. It is, then, outside of heredity, for it is unique. The same thoughts might be applied to Beethoven, and with still more force, for the only musical examples in his line were those of his father and grandfather, chapel-masters. Similar instances are abundant. We might cite, among the painters, Raphael, whose father, and Titian, whose sons and brother, were respectable but not illustrious artists. Among great men of science what real relation can exist, in the order of skill and genius,