One may be more indulgent with good, docile children. Those who cry easily, who blush and scream, give less trouble than those who grow pale and tremble, who do not manifest their resentment by an immediate outburst, as though they were brooding hatred in a corner of their hearts.
A peasant-woman, in speaking of someone, once said to me: 'I have seen him gnash his teeth when a boy for a mere nothing, and so I would not marry him, and I was quite right.’ In mental sufferings, when the tension of the nervous system cannot find a vent in immediate emotion, it accumulates and becomes more incontrollable in long-suppressed outbursts; the rage which we thought subdued continues to torture us and gnaw our vitals.
Indulgence should be shown to nervous children who suffer from convulsions, or are predisposed to such. One must be kind to them and not oppose their caprices with too much severity, unless they are actually insensate. Even loving punishment provokes an explosion of grief and nervous agitation in these unhappy children; every violent emotion leaves an imperceptible, morbid, accumulative tendency behind. In opposing them one falls 'out of the frying-pan into the fire.’
It is better to preserve their lives and postpone stricter education till they become less sensitive; in the meantime they must not be fatigued with study, but strengthened like a plant which one places in the sun and open air, and from which one prunes the injurious shoots at a later time. This is often successful, and then they may be ranked again with healthy children. Even for the latter, premature education is a very grievous error. Parents who make their children learn too many things, sacrifice their future to gratify their own ambition. Nature must not be forced, nor the activity of the nervous system exhausted before the body has grown strong.
Parents who have already some weak spot—a little fault in the character, a slight blemish in the organism—should redouble their care in order to cure their children from their own defects. Just as a scirrhus, cancer, consumption, neurosis, are transmitted from one generation to another, just as the large mouth, the long nose, the eyes and hair of this or that colour, are inherited, so vices, virtues, and moral dispositions are handed down from family to family. In little villages especially, in which one may best trace the customs of an ancestor in the whole of his descendants, one often hears such sayings as 'His father was just the same; his grandfather was a great good-for-nothing, too.’ 'Generosity is hereditary in that house.’ Thus were cynicism and cruelty transmitted from one to another in the family of the Claudii.
The root of a family tree may be compared to one of those Chinese boxes full of other boxes gradually decreasing in size, the unending succession of which strikes us with wonder. Marriage and intermarriage with other families mix and mingle these boxes in such a way that an inextricable confusion arises; but if from some height we could watch the long line of generations, we should see that they continue slowly to disclose themselves. Some children resemble the grandfather, the great-grandfather, or the great-great-grandfather, as though a seed had passed through several generations without unclosing, and then had suddenly sprung into life with such resemblance in features, manners, voice, eyes, character, that the old people recognise it and say, 'He is the very image of his grandfather.’ Thus the forefathers are born and live again in future generations.
III
What a wonderful phenomenon is this power in man to reappear in future generations by means of heredity, to transmit his own nature to his descendants by transfusing it—working it into their organism! And no less wonderful is it to see how not only instincts but organs gradually disappear in the course of generations when they are not put into action. In insects, crustaceans, fish, amphibians which have migrated to caverns and have lived for many generations in the dark, the eyes are almost imperceptible, and this is certainly not the result of natural selection, for eyes are not injurious even to beings living in the dark, but solely because, with the cessation of the activity of an organ, it must of necessity retrograde.
Three or four generations are necessary before horses completely lose their wild instincts, so that some horse-breeders only choose those that have been already trained in the circus.
If one takes two hounds exactly alike (of the same mother and the same litter) and accustoms the one to the chase, the other to watch the house; if one then allows them to breed separately, so as to form two distinct families, one to start the game for man when hunting, the other to guard his house against strangers, we may be certain that after four or five generations their instincts will be profoundly modified. If after ten years one takes a litter from each of these families descended from a common ancestor, and rears them in the same room under the same conditions, far from every noise, and brings them when they are grown into a meadow, it will be seen that, at the report of a gun, the offspring of the dogs trained for the chase will look around as though trying to espy a bird, while the others run off terrified.