Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/545

Rh or of any of the men who have single handed and alone set guideposts to history, and given the world large portions of its heritage of truth. What can set limit to the possible variations of fruitful intellectual power? Rare such variations—that is their law: the greater the variation, the more rare! But so is genius: the greater, the more rare. And as to the rat with the human hand, he would not be left to starve and decay in his hole; he would be put in alcohol when he died, and kept in a museum! And the lesson which he would teach to the wise biologist would be that here, in this rat, Nature had shown her genius by discounting in advance the slow processes of evolution.

It is indeed the force of such considerations as these which has led to many justifications of the position that the genius is quite out of connection with the social movement of his time. Prof. William James, for instance, in a most vivid and interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly, October, 1888, brings out the implications of the doctrine of variations very clearly, and bases upon it the further position that the causes which enter into the production of variations in the heredity of the individual are altogether physiological, and so represent a complete "cycle," apart from the other "cycle" of causes found in the physical and social environment of the individual. So that the individual brings his variations to his society whether society will or not; and as to whether there be any harmony between him and his social fellows—that is a matter of outcome rather than of expectation or theory.

But this is not tenable, as we have reason to think, from the interaction which actually takes place between the two so-called "cycles" of causation. To be sure, the heredity of the individual is a physiological matter, in the sense that the son must inherit from his parents and their ancestors alone. But granted that two certain parents are his parents, we may ask how these two certain parents came to be his parents. How did his father come to marry his mother, and the reverse? This is distinctly a social question; and to its solution all the currents of social influence and suggestion contribute. Who is free from social considerations in selecting his wife? Does the coachman have an equal chance to get the heiress, or the blacksmith the clergyman's daughter? Do we find inroads made in Newport society by the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk? And are not the inroads which we do find, the inroads made by the dukes and the marquises, due to influences which are quite social and psychological? And, on the other hand, what leads the duke and the marquis to lay their titles at Newport doors, while the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk keep away, but the ability of both these types of suitors to estimate their chances just on social and psychological