One's own experience has the advantage of complete certainty and the greatest speciality, and this outweighs the disadvantage that arises from it, that its sphere is limited and its examples not generally known. Therefore, primarily, I refer every one to his own experience. First of all let him consider himself, confess to himself his inclinations and passions, his characteristic errors and weaknesses, his vices, and also his excellences and virtues, if he has any. Then let him think of his father, and he cannot fail to recognise all these characteristic traits in him also. On the other hand, he will often find his mother of an entirely different character, and a moral agreement with her will very seldom occur, indeed only through the exceptional accident of a similarity of the character of the two parents. Let him make this examination, for example, with reference to quick temper or patience, avarice or prodigality, inclination to sensuality, or to intemperance, or to gambling, hard-heartedness or kindliness, honesty or hypocrisy, pride or condescension, courage or cowardice, peaceableness or quarrelsomeness, placability or resentfulness, &c. Then let him make the same investigation with regard to all those whose characters and whose parents he has accurately known. If he proceeds attentively, with correct judgment, and candidly, the confirmation of our principle will not be lacking. Thus, for example, he will find the special tendency to lie, which belongs to many men, equally present in two brothers, because they have inherited it from the father; on this account also the comedy, “The Liar and his Son,” is psychologically correct. However, two inevitable limitations must here be borne in mind, which only open [pg 320] injustice could interpret as evasions. First, pater semper incertus. Only a decided physical resemblance to the father removes this limitation; a superficial resemblance, on the other hand, is not sufficient to do so; for there is an after-effect of earlier impregnation by virtue of which the children of the second marriage have sometimes still a slight resemblance to the first husband, and children begotten in adultery to the legitimate father. Such an after-effect has been still more distinctly observed in the case of brutes. The second limitation is, that in the son the moral character of the father certainly appears, yet under the modification which it has received through another and often very different intellect (the inheritance from the mother), and thus a correction of the observation becomes necessary. This modification may be important or trifling in proportion to that difference, but it can never be so great that the fundamental traits of the paternal character do not always appear under it recognisably enough, like a man who has disguised himself by an entirely different kind of dress, wig, and beard. For example, if by inheritance from the mother a man is pre-eminently endowed with reason, thus with the power of reflection and deliberation, the passions inherited from his father are partly bridled by this, partly concealed, and accordingly only attain to a methodical, systematic, or secret manifestation, and thus a very different phenomenon from that of the father, who perhaps had only a very limited mind, will then result; and in the same way the converse case may occur. The inclinations and passions of the mother, on the other hand, do not reappear at all in the children, often indeed their opposite.
Historical examples have the advantage over those of private life of being universally known; but, on the other hand, they are of course impaired by the uncertainty and frequent falsification of all tradition, and especially also by the fact that as a rule they only contain the public, not the private life, and consequently only the political actions, not the [pg 321] finer manifestations of character. However, I wish to support the truth we are speaking of by a few historical examples, to which those who have made a special study of history can no doubt add a far larger number of equally pertinent cases.
It is well known that P. Decius Mus sacrificed his life for his country with heroic nobleness; for, solemnly committing himself and the enemy to the infernal deities, with covered face he plunged into the army of the Latins. About forty years later his son, of the same name, did exactly the same thing in the war against the Gauls (Liv. viii. 6; x. 28). Thus a thorough proof of the Horatian fortes creantur fortibus et bonis: the converse of which is thus given by Shakspeare—
“Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base.”
—Cymbeline, iv. 2.
Early Roman history presents to us whole families whose members in long succession distinguished themselves by devoted patriotism and courage; such were the gens Fabia and the gens Fabricia. Again, Alexander the Great was fond of power and conquest, like his father Philip. The pedigree of Nero which, with a moral intention, Suetonius (c. 4 et 5) gives at the beginning of his sketch of this monster is very well worth considering. It is the gens Claudia he describes, which flourished in Rome through six centuries, and produced not only capable, but arrogant and cruel men. From it sprang Tiberius, Caligula, and finally Nero. In his grandfather, and still more strongly in his father, all those atrocious qualities show themselves, which could only attain their perfect development in Nero, partly because his higher position afforded them freer scope, partly because he had for his mother the irrational Bacchante, Agrippina, who could impart to him no intellect to bridle his passions. Quite in our sense, therefore, Suetonius relates that at his birth præsagio fuit etiam Domitii, patris, vox, inter gratulationes amicorum, negantis, quidquam ex se [pg 322]et Agrippina, nisi detestabile et malo publico nasci potuisse. On the other hand, Cimon was the son of Miltiades, and Hannibal of Hamilcar, and the Scipios make up a whole family of heroes and noble defenders of their country. But the son of Pope Alexander VI. was his hideous image, Cæsar Borgia. The son of the notorious Duke of Alba was just as cruel and wicked a man as his father. The malicious and unjust Philip IV. of France, who is specially known by his cruel torture and execution of the knights templars, had for his daughter Isabella, wife of Edward II. of England, who rebelled against her husband, took him prisoner, and after he had signed his abdication, since the attempt to kill him by ill-usage was unsuccessful, caused him to be put to death in prison in a manner which is too horrible for me to care to relate. The blood-thirsty tyrant and defensor fidei, Henry VIII. of England had a daughter by his first marriage, Queen Mary, equally distinguished for bigotry and cruelty, who from her numerous burnings of heretics has won the name of Bloody Mary. His daughter by his second marriage, Elizabeth, received an excellent understanding from her mother, Anne Boleyn, which prevented bigotry and curbed the parental character in her, yet did not do away with it; so that it still always shone through on occasions, and distinctly appeared in her cruel treatment of Mary of Scotland. Van Geuns[35] tells a story, after Marcus Donatus, of a Scotch girl whose father had been burnt as a highway robber and a cannibal when she was only one year old. Although she was brought up among quite different people, there developed in her the same craving for human flesh, and being caught in the act of satisfying it, she was buried alive. In the Freimüthigen of the 13th July 1821 we read that in the department of Aube the police pursued a girl because she had murdered two children, whom she ought to have taken to the [pg 323] foundling hospital, in order to keep the little money given to the children. At last the police found the girl on the road to Paris, near Romilly, drowned, and her own father gave himself up as her murderer. Finally, let me mention a couple of cases which have occurred recently, and have therefore only the newspapers as their vouchers. In October 1836 a Count Belecznai was condemned to death in Hungary because he had murdered an official and severely wounded his own relations. His elder brother was executed earlier as a patricide, and his father also had been a murderer (Frankfurter Postzeitung of the 26th October 1836). A year later the youngest brother of this Count, in the same street where the latter had murdered the official, fired a pistol at the steward of his estates, but missed him (Frankfurter Journal, 16th September 1837). In the Frankfurter Postzeitung of the 19th November 1857 a correspondent in Paris announces the condemnation to death of a very dangerous highway robber, Lemaire, and his companions, and adds: “The criminal tendency seems hereditary in his family and in those of his confederates, as several of their race have died on the scaffold.” It follows from a passage in the Laws of Plato that similar cases were already known in Greece (Stob. Flor., vol. ii. p. 213). The annals of crime will certainly have many similar pedigrees to show. The tendency to suicide is specially hereditary.
On the other hand, when we see the excellent Marcus Aurelius have the wicked Commodus for a son, this does not not lead us astray; for we know that the Diva Faustina was a uxor infamis. On the contrary, we mark this case in order in analogous cases to presume an analogous reason; for example, that Domitian was the full brother of Titus I can never believe, but that Vespasian also was a deceived husband.
Now, as regards the second part of the principle set up thus the inheritance of the intellect from the mother, this enjoys a far more general acceptance than the first part, [pg 324] which in itself appeals to the liberum arbitrium indifferentiæ, while its separate apprehension is opposed by the doctrine of the simplicity and indivisibility of the soul. Even the old and popular expression “mother-wit” shows the early recognition of this second truth, which depends upon the experience both with regard to small and great intellectual endowments, that they are the possession of those whose mothers proportionately distinguished themselves by their intelligence. That, on the other hand, the intellectual qualities of the father are not transmitted to the son is proved both by the fathers and the sons of men distinguished by the most eminent faculties, for, as a rule, they are quite ordinary men, without a trace of the paternal mental gifts. But if now an isolated exception to this experience, so often confirmed, should appear; such, for example, as is presented by Pitt and his father, Lord Chatham, we are warranted in ascribing it to accident, nay, obliged to do so, although, on account of the exceptional rarity of great talents, it is certainly an accident of a most extraordinary kind. Here, however, the rule holds good: it is improbable that the improbable never happens. Besides, great statesmen (as was already mentioned in chapter 22) are so just as much through the qualities of their character, thus through what is inherited from the father, as through the superiority of their mind. On the other hand, among artists, poets, and philosophers, to whose works alone genius is properly ascribed, I know of no case analogous to that. Raphael's father was certainly a painter, but not a great one; Mozart's father, and also his son, were musicians, but not great ones. However, it is indeed wonderful that the fate which had destined a very short life to both of these men, each the greatest in his own sphere, as it were by way of compensation, took care, by letting them be born already in their workshop, that, without suffering the loss of time in youth which for the most part occurs in the case of other men of genius, they received even from childhood, through [pg 325] paternal example and instruction, the necessary introduction into the art to which they were exclusively destined. This secret and mysterious power which seems to guide the individual life I have made the subject of special investigations, which I have communicated in the essay, “Ueber die scheinbare Absichtlichkeit im Schicksale des Einzelnen” (Parerga, vol. i.). It is further to be observed here that there are certain scientific occupations which certainly presuppose good native faculties, yet not those which are really rare and extraordinary; while the principal requirements are zealous efforts, diligence, patience, early instruction, sustained study, and much practice. From this, and not from the inheritance of the intellect of the father, the fact is to be explained that, since the son always willingly follows the path that has been opened up by the father, and almost all businesses are hereditary in certain families, in some sciences also, which before everything demand diligence and persistence, individual families can show a succession of men of merit; such are the Scaligers, the Bernouillis, the Cassinis, the Herschels.
The number of proofs of the actual inheritance of the intellect of the mother would be much greater than it appears if it were not that the character and disposition of the female sex is such that women rarely give public proof of their mental faculties; and therefore these do not become historical, and thus known to posterity. Besides, on account of the weaker nature in general of the female sex, these faculties themselves can never reach the grade in them to which they may afterwards rise in the son; thus, with reference to themselves, we have to estimate their achievements higher in this proportion. Accordingly, in the first instance, only the following examples present themselves as proofs of our truth. Joseph II. was the son of Maria Theresia. Cardanus says in the third chapter, “De vita propria:” “Mater mea fuit memoria et ingenio pollens.” J. J. Rousseau says in the first book of the “Confessions:” “La beauté de ma mère, son [pg 326]esprit, ses talents,—elle en avait de trop brillans pour son état,” &c., and then quotes some delightful lines of hers. D'Alembert was the illegitimate son of Claudine de Tencin, a woman of superior mind, and the author of several romances and similar works, which met with great approbation in her day, and should even still be enjoyable (see her biography in the “Blätter für litterarische Unterhaltung,” March 1845, Nos. 71-73). That Buffon's mother was a remarkable woman is shown by the following passage from the “Voyage à Montbar, par Hérault de Sechelles,” which Flourens quotes in his “Histoire des travaux de Buffon,” p. 288: “Buffon avait ce principe qu'en général les enfants tenaient de leur mère leurs qualités intellectuelles et morales: et lorsqu'il l'avait développé dans la conversation, il en faisait sur-le-champ l'application à lui-même, en faisant un éloge pompeux de sa mère, qui avait en effet, beaucoup d'esprit, des connaissances étandues, et une tête très bien organisée.” That he includes the moral qualities is an error which is either committed by the reporter, or depends upon the fact that his mother had accidentally the same character as himself and his father. The contrary of this is shown in innumerable cases in which the mother and the son have opposite characters. Hence the greatest dramatists could present, in Orestes and Hamlet, mother and son in hostile conflict, in which the son appears as the moral representative and avenger of his father. On the other hand, the converse case, that the son should appear as the moral representative and avenger of the mother against the father, would be revolting and, at the same time, almost absurd. This depends upon the fact that between father and son there is actual identity of nature, which is the will, but between mother and son there is merely identity of intellect, and even this only in a conditioned manner. Between mother and son the greatest moral opposition can exist, between father and son only an intellectual opposition. From this point of view, also, one should recognise the necessity of the Salic [pg 327] law: the woman cannot carry on the race. Hume says in his short autobiography: “Our mother was a woman of singular merit.” It is said of Kant's mother in the most recent biography by F. W. Schubert: “According to the judgment of her son himself, she was a woman of great natural understanding. For that time, when there was so little opportunity for the education of girls, she was exceptionally well instructed, and she also continued later to care for her further education by herself. In the course of walks she drew the attention of her son to all kinds of natural phenomena, and tried to explain to him through them the power of God.” What a remarkably able, clever, and superior woman Goethe's mother was is now universally known. How much she has been spoken of in literature! while his father has not been spoken of at all; Goethe himself describes him as a man of subordinate faculties. Schiller's mother was susceptible to poetry, and made verses herself, a fragment of which will be found in his biography by Schwab. Bürger, that genuine poetic genius, to whom perhaps the first place after Goethe among German poets belongs—for compared with his ballads those of Schiller seem cold and laboured—has given an account of his parents which for us is significant, and which his friend and physician, Althof repeats in his biography which appeared in 1798, in these words: “Bürger's father was certainly provided with a variety of knowledge after the manner of study prevalent at the time, and was also a good, honourable man; but he loved his quiet comfort and his pipe of tobacco so much, that, as my friend used to say, he had always first to pull himself together if he was going to apply himself for a quarter of an hour or so to the instruction of his son. His wife was a woman of extraordinary mental endowments, which, however, were so little cultivated that she had scarcely learnt to write legibly. Bürger thought that with proper culture his mother would have been the most famous of her sex, although he several times expressed a strong disapproval of different traits of [pg 328] her moral character. However, he believed that he inherited from his mother some mental gifts, and from his father an agreement with his moral character.” Walter Scott's mother was a poetess, and was in communication with the wits of her time, as we learn from the obituary notice of Walter Scott in the Globe of 24th September 1832. That poems of hers appeared in print in 1789 I find from an article entitled “Mother-wit,” in the Blätter für litterarische Unterhaltung of 4th October 1841, published by Brockhaus, which gives a long list of clever mothers of distinguished men, from which I shall only take two: “Bacon's mother was a distinguished linguist, wrote and translated several works, and in all of them showed learning, acuteness, and taste. Boerhave's mother distinguished herself through medical knowledge.” On the other hand, Haller has preserved for us a strong proof of the inheritance of the mental weakness of the mother, for he says: “E duabus patriciis sororibus, ob divitias maritos nactis, quum tamen fatuis essent proximæ, novimus in nobilissimas gentes nunc a seculo retro ejus morbi manasse semina, ut etiam in quarta generatione, quintave, omnium posterorum aliqui fatui supersint” (Elementa physiol., Lib. xxix. § 8). Also, according to Esquirol, madness is more frequently inherited from the mother than the father. If, however, it is inherited from the father, I attribute this to the disposition of the character whose influence occasions it.
It seems to follow from our principle that sons of the same mother have equal mental capacity, and if one should be highly gifted the other must be so also. Sometimes it is so. Examples of this are the Carracci, Joseph and Michael Haydn, Bernard and Andreas Romberg, George and Frederic Cuvier. I would also add the brothers Schlegel, if it were not that the younger, Friedrich, made himself unworthy of the honour of being named along with his excellent, blameless, and highly distinguished brother, August Wilhelm, by the disgraceful obscurantism which in the last quarter of his life he pursued along with Adam [pg 329] Müller. For obscurantism is a sin, possibly not against the Holy Spirit, but yet against the human spirit, which one ought therefore never to forgive, but always and everywhere implacably to remember against whoever has been guilty of it, and take every opportunity of showing contempt for him so long as he lives, nay, after he is dead. But just as often the above result does not take place; for example, Kant's brother was quite an ordinary man. To explain this I must remind the reader of what is said in the thirty-first chapter on the physiological conditions of genius. Not only an extraordinarily developed and absolutely correctly formed brain (the share of the mother) is required, but also a very energetic action of the heart to animate it, i.e., subjectively a passionate will, a lively temperament: this is the inheritance from the father. But this quality is at its height only during the father's strongest years; and the mother ages still more quickly. Accordingly the highly gifted sons will, as a rule, be the eldest, begotten in the full strength of both parents; thus Kant's brother was eleven years younger than him. Even in the case of two distinguished brothers, as a rule, the elder will be the superior. But not only the age, but every temporary ebb of the vital force or other disturbance of health in the parents at the time when the child is begotten may interfere with the part of one or other, and prevent the appearance of a man of eminent talent, which is therefore so exceedingly rare a phenomenon. It may be said, in passing, that in the case of twins the absence of all the differences just mentioned is the cause of the quasi-identity of their nature.