I fear you think of Galton only when you limit the word heredity. Universal life and growth is touched by the larger meaning: Galton’s wonderful books represent merely a domestic paragraph of the subject. The underlying principles of evolution—the deep laws of physiological growth and development—involve far vaster and profounder consideration of the subject. Inheritance is no “fad:” it means you and me and the world and our central sun.
My text was plain,—but you have forgotten it. I spoke of “ancestral pleasure,” “hereditary delight.” You deny their possibility. The toys are not ancestral, of course, nor did I say they were,—but they appealed to ancestral feeling. Why? All pleasure is hereditary—every feeling is inherited. Why, then, say so? Because in this case we are considering race-feelings widely differentiated from our own.
But all this is surface,—the ghostly side of the question is the beautiful one, and one which you would not deny without examining the evidence? Perhaps you think that the first time you saw Fuji or Miyanoshita, you had really a new sensation. But you had nothing of the kind. The sensations of that new experience in your own life were millions of years old! Far from simple is the commonest of our pleasures, but a layer, infinitely multiple, of myriads of millions of ancestral impressions. Try to analyze the sensation of pleasure in a sunrise, or the smell of hay, and how soon we are lost. We can only classify the elements of such a pleasure “by bundles,” so to speak.
It might at first sight shock a strong soul to perceive itself not individual and original, but an infinite compound. But I think one’s pride in one’s good should subsequently expand. The thought that one’s strength is the strength of one’s ancestors—of a host innumerable and ancient as the race—has its larger consolation. And here is the poetry of the thing. You are my friend B. H. C. But you are much more—you are also Captain B. H., and a host of others—doubtless Viking and Norman and Danish—a procession reaching back into the weird twilight of the Northern gods.
So much for the fun of our discussion. I won’t send the long screed: it is too full of dry stuff, and on reading it over I find that my enthusiasm betrayed me into several wild misstatements.
I am sorry about your cold, and I can sympathize; for I also have been ill, and my boy, and I find spring very trying. I am all right to-day, and so are we all.
Wish I were nineteen years old, and, like Ben, going to sea. As a boy, I cried and made a great fuss because they told me, “You can’t go to sea: you are too near-sighted.” Perhaps I was saved from disillusions.
You know Frederick Soulié’s “Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait.” There was an unconscious recognition of heredity,—before modern biology had been synthetized.
Ever with best wishes and regards,