MEYERBEER (Jakob Baer);

His two brothers, the one, Wilhelm, an astronomer, noted for his lunar chart, the other, Michael, a poet, who died young.

MOZART.

His father, Johann Georg, second Kapellmeister to the PrinceBishop of Salzburg;

His sister, whose success while yet a child seemed to give evidence of talent not realized in maturer years;

His son, Carl, was an amateur musician ;

His son, Wolfgang, born four months after his father's death, gave evidence early in life of a happy turn for music. PALESTRINA. His sons, Angelo, Rodolfo, and Sylla, who all died young, seemed to have inherited some of their father's talent, if we may judge by some of their compositions which have been preserved.

ROSSINI.

His father and mother musicians at fairs.

CHAPTER V.

HEREDITY OF THE INTELLECT.

I.

THE faculty of knowing may be hypothetically divided into two parts the one includes perception, memory, and imagination, of which we have now studied the heredity; there will remain for the other a certain number of faculties which have for their object abstract and general conceptions, which we will here call intellect proper. We have now to consider if these last-named modes of knowing, which are the highest of all, are subject to the law of heredity.

First, it is evident that these manifestations of thought are indeed the higher forms of the human intellect—that is to say, of the highest intellect of which we are cognizant. Man can rise from the concrete and confused sensation to the simplicity of abstract notions; he can reduce a countless mass of facts to one general idea, and denote it by an arbitrary sign; he can, by ratiocination, arrive at the most remote, or the most complicated conse

F

quences, and divine the future from the past. It is because man can compare, judge, abstract, generalize, deduct, and form inductions, that sciences, religion, art, morals, social and political life, have sprung into being, and have continued their incessant evolution. So wonderful are these faculties, that, by their accumulated results, they have made of man, as it were, a being apart from all the rest of nature.

The inquiry, therefore, whether these faculties can be hereditary, is an inquiry whether psychological life, in its highest form, is subject to this law of biology. If we take a narrow and superficial point of view, it might appear as if, so far, we had at most proved the heredity of the lower forms of intelligence, and as if we had merely touched the outer margin of the subject; and it might be said that we have no right to argue from the less to the greater, from the lower to the higher. Now, however, we meet the diffi

culty face to face.

It cannot, however, be said that the controversy with regard to this point has been very keen. It could only have been maintained by metaphysicians who have for the most part shown the utmost indifference for this subject. The partisans of experience, physiologists and others, who have treated of heredity, have generally attributed to it the greatest degree of influence. Some, carried away by misdirected zeal, and more concerned about the hypothetical consequences of such a doctrine than about its intrinsic truth, have imagined a division of the intellectual faculties, and have withdrawn one portion of it from heredity. According to this theory, which claims the authority of Aristotle, we have two souls, the one sensitive or animal, transmissible like the body, and the other rational or human, 'not dependent on the act of generation,' and which would, therefore, lie wholly beyond the influence of heredity. This hypothesis, now wholly obsolete, needs no discussion. They who maintain it, and Lordat in particular, have shown so clearly that their preconceived opinion would not submit to facts, that criticism is quite superfluous.

The problem for us is this: Are the higher, like the lower, modes of intellect transmissible? Are our faculties of abstraction, judgment, ratiocination, invention, governed by heredity, as are our perceptive faculties? Or, in plainer terms, and in common

parlance,—Are common sense, insanity, genius, talent, subtlety, aptitude for abstract studies, hereditary?

In order to reply, we will examine the question from the two-fold standpoint of theory and fact, of metaphysics and experience. Reason will show that the heredity of intellect is possible, experience that it is real.

If we admit the heredity of the lower modes of intellect—and facts are here decisive-logic alone ought to convince us that it extends to all intellect, for it is admitted by all schools of thought that this faculty is essentially one. Psychology has always distinguished different modes of the faculty of knowing, and, indeed, the analytical study of intellect is only possible on that condition. But these are but differences in the way of looking at them, not specific differences. In the same way, phrenologists have thought that they could assign to each faculty a special portion of the brain; but, even had their view been sustained, such localization would in no degree have invalidated the unity of the intellect itself. However far back the question may be carried, every inquiry into the ultimate nature of intellect must necessarily issue in one or other of these two conclusions: either it is an effect, of which the cause is the organism; or it is a cause, of which the effect is all that exists or can be known. The first hypothesis is called materialism, the second idealism. We shall see, taking our stand on reasoning only, that between these two hypotheses and the heredity of the higher modes of intellect there exists no contradiction, no logical incompatibility.

There is no difficulty in the materialistic hypothesis; for if it be admitted that thought is only a property of living matter, then, as heredity is one of the laws of life, it must therefore be also one of the laws of thought. Or, in more precise terms, intellect is a function whose organ is the brain; the brain is transmissible, as is every other organ, the stomach, the lungs, and the heart; the function is transmissible with the organ; therefore intellect is transmissible with the brain. Physiological heredity involves, as a necessary consequence, psychological heredity in all its forms.

On the other hand, the idealistic hypothesis seems to stand in utter opposition to heredity of intellect; but, as will be seen, this opposition is not so radical as would at first appear.

Idealism has recently found learned and able advocates; its details will hereafter be noticed. Enough here to explain, in a few words, that idealism is that metaphysical system which holds thought to be the only reality. Sometimes, regarding thought or intellect as a secondary and derivative mode of existence, it strives to ascend still higher, and to discover in will the first cause of all things, the supreme reality. Such is the position of Schopenhauer and his school, that is to say, the most philosophic form of contemporary idealism. Thus exalted, and under this exceedingly abstract form, idealism is as far removed as it well can be from experience, in the common acceptation of that term. To experience, however, it must come. This system, like all others, must account for the world of sense, for nature, and her phenomena and laws. There being no other absolute existence save thought, matter must be referred to thought. Matter, according to Schelling, can be nothing else but extinct or exteriorized mind.' Hegel defines it to be idea made objective to itself. It matters little what these theories are worth. Idealism has never explained the transition from the absolute to the relative, from mind to matter, except by metaphors,—a process, moreover, which it has in common with every other metaphysical system. It is enough that it admits the material world, with its laws, as a purely phenomenal existence. In this admission we find the basis for a reconciliation between idealism and heredity.

For if we hold, with Schopenhauer, that the will is the primitive element in everything and in every being, then intellect will be only a derived faculty, a first step toward materialization. Hence it will be subject to the mechanism of logic, emprisoned in the 'forms of thought,' in the categories discovered and analyzed by Kant, and, like all the rest of nature, it will have its laws. This admission is enough. Henceforth, between the idealists and ourselves there exists no real opposition. Their theory is that there are two distinct modes of existence: the noumenon in the will and the phenomenon in the intellect and in nature. To the mind, regarded as noumenon, none of our conceptions of laws, logical necessity, or categories are applicable; for all this only pertains to the mind considered as phenomenon. Consequently, since we restrict ourselves to the study of experience-that is to say, of

facts and their laws-there can be no disagreement between us and the idealists. The difference between us springs, not from any diametrical opposition of doctrine, but from the fact that to the study of phenomena which both sides pursue, and to which we strictly confine ourselves, the idealist joins a metaphysical theory, which, in our eyes, has no scientific value, since it transcends science.

It is true that idealists hold that the laws of nature, and, generally, of internal or external experience, have only a relative phenomenal value; but we have never asserted that experience can give us the absolute. If the idealist admits, as he does, that in the order of physical, chemical, physiological, and psychological facts there are coexistences and sequences that can be reduced to fixed formulas, he has no fair grounds for refusing to concede to heredity a place among these empiric laws, though he may deny that it applies to the intellect considered as noumenon.

Thus the heredity of intellectual faculties can be reconciled with the most transcendental idealism. If, now, we examine the question in our own way, that is, without transcending experience, we say that intellect, in its inmost nature, appears to us as one of the manifestations of the unknowable. We may, indeed, as psychology and the sciences advance, determine its empiric laws and conditions more precisely; but we shall not arrive at its essential nature. It is indisputable that within the last thirty years English and German psychologists and particularly Herbert Spencer, Bain, and Wundt-have, with a precision previously unknown, analyzed the modes of intellect and the conditions of its development. They have shown that all intellectual processes, from the highest and most complex down to the most elementary, consist in apprehending resemblances and differences. To assimilate and dissimilate, to integrate and disintegrate, to combine and differentiate such is the fundamental process of the intellect, and it is found in all its operations, as well in the simplest as in the most complex. Yet this analysis, while it discloses to us in a striking way the 'unity of composition' of psychic processes, in reality only enables us to understand the mechanism of intellect and the laws of its empiric development. We may, indeed, reduce the infinite variety of the facts of thought to two simple facts, viz.