My Autobiography: A Fragment

by F. Max Müller

Many more stories of his absent-mindedness were en vogue about Dr. Neander, but that this man, a pillar of strength to the orthodox in Germany, who was looked up to as an infallible Pope, should have his name coupled with that of Strauss certainly gave one a little shock. Yet it was at Oxford that I pitched my tent, chiefly in order to superintend the printing of my Rig-veda at the University Press there, and never dreaming that a fellowship, still less a professorship in that ancient Tory University, would ever be offered to me.

For me to go to Oxford to get a fellowship or professorship would have seemed about as absurd as going to Rome to become a Cardinal or a Pope; and yet in time I was chosen a Fellow of All Souls, and the first married Fellow of the College, and even a professorship was offered to me when I least expected it. The fact is, I never thought of either, and no one was more surprised than myself when I was asked to act as deputy, and then as full Taylorian Professor; no one could have mistrusted his eyes more than I did, when one of the Fellows of All Soul’s informed me by letter that it was the intention of the College to elect me one of its fellows. My ambition had never soared so high. I was thinking of returning to Leipzig as a Privat-docent, to rise afterwards to an extraordinary and, if all went well, to an ordinary professorship.

But after these two appointments at Oxford had secured to me what I thought a fair social and financial position in England, I did not feel justified in attempting to begin life again in Germany. I had not asked for a professorship or fellowship. They were offered me, and my ambition never went beyond securing what was necessary for my independence. In Germany I was supposed to have become quite wealthy; in England people knew how small my income really was, and wondered how I managed to live on it. They did not suppose that I had chiefly to depend on my pen in order to live as a professor is expected to live at Oxford. I could not see anything anomalous in a German holding a professorship in England. There were several cases of the same kind in Germany. Lassen (1800-1876), our great Sanskrit professor at Bonn, was a Norwegian by birth, and no one ever thought of his nationality. What had that to do with his knowledge of Sanskrit? Nor was I ever treated as an alien or as intruder at Oxford, at least not at that early time. As to myself, I had now obtained what seemed to me a small but sufficient income with perfect independence. The quiet life of a quiet student had been from my earliest days my ideal in life. Even at school at Dessau, when we boys talked of what we hoped to be, I remember how my ideal was that of a monk, undisturbed in his monastery, surrounded by books and by a few friends. The idea that I should ever rise to be a professor in a university, or that any career like that of my father, grandfather, and other members of my family would ever be open to me, never entered my mind then. It seemed to me almost disloyal to think of ever taking their places. Even when I saw that there were no longer any Protestant monks, no Benedictines, the place of an assistant in a large library, sitting in a quiet corner, was my highest ambition.

I do not see why it should have been so, for all my relations and friends occupied high places in the public service, but as I had no father to open my eyes, and to stimulate my ambition—he having died before I was four years old—my ideas of life and its possibilities were evidently taken from my young widowed mother, whose one desire was to be left alone, much as the world tempted her, then not yet thirty years old, to give up her mourning and to return to society. Thus it soon became my own philosophy of life, to be left alone, free to go my own way, or like Diogenes, to live in my own tub. Here we see what I call the influence of circumstances, of surroundings, or as others call it, of environment. This, however, is very different from atavism, as we shall see presently. Atavism also has been called a kind of environment, attacking us and influencing us from the past, and as it were, from behind, from the North in fact instead of the South, the East, and the West, and from all the points of the compass.

But atavism means really a very different thing, if indeed it means anything at all.

I must ease my conscience once for all on this point, and say what I feel about atavism and environment. Environment in the shape of friends, of locality, and other material circumstances, has certainly influenced my life very much, and I could never see why such a hybrid word as environment should be used instead of surroundings or circumstances. Creatures of circumstances would be far better understood than creatures of environment; but environment, I suppose, would sound more scientific. Atavism also is a new word, instead of family likeness, but unless carefully defined, the word is very apt to mislead us.

When it is said[4] that children often resemble their grandfathers or grandmothers more than their immediate parents, and that this propensity is termed atavism, this does not seem quite correct even etymologically, for atavus in Latin did not mean father or grandfather, but at first great-great-great-grandfather, and then only ancestors; and what should be made quite clear is that this mysterious atavism should not be used by careful speakers, to express the supposed influence of parents or even grandparents, but that of more distant ancestors only, and possibly of a whole family.

Many biographers, such is the fashion now, begin their works with a long account not only of father and mother, but of grandparents and of ever so many ancestors, in order to show how these determined the outward and inward character of the man whose life has to be written. Who would deny that there is some truth, or at least some plausibility, in atavism, though no one has as yet succeeded in giving an intelligible account of it? It is supposed to affect the moral as well as the physical peculiarities of the offspring, and that here, too, physical and moral qualities often go together cannot be denied. A blind person, for instance, is generally cautious, but happy and quite at his ease in large societies. A deaf person is often suspicious and unhappy in society. In inheriting blindness, therefore, a man could well be said to have inherited cautiousness; in inheriting deafness, suspiciousness would seem to have come to him by inheritance.

But is blindness really inherited? Is the son of a father who has lost his eyesight blind, and necessarily blind? We must distinguish between atavistic and parental influences. Parental influences would mean the influence of qualities acquired by the parents, and directly bequeathed to their offspring; atavistic influences would refer to qualities inherited and transmitted, it may be, through several generations, and engrained in a whole family. In keeping these two classes separate, we should only be following Weismann’s example, who denies altogether that acquired qualities are ever heritable. His examples are most interesting and most important, and many Darwinians have had to accept his amendment. Besides, we should always consider whether certain peculiarities are constant in a family or inconstant. If a father is a drunkard, surely it does not follow that his sons must be drunkards. Neither does it follow that all the children must be sober if the parents are sober. Of course, in ordinary conversation both parental and ancestral influences seem clear enough. But if a child is said to favour his mother, because like her he has blue eyes and fair hair, what becomes of the heritage from the father who may have brown eyes and dark hair? Whatever may happen to the children, there is always an excuse, only an excuse is not an explanation. If the daughter of a beautiful woman grows up very plain, the Frenchman was no doubt right when he remarked, C’était alors le père qui n’était pas bien, and if the son of a teetotaller should later in life become a drunkard, the conclusion would be even worse. In fact, this kind of atavistic or parental influence is a very pleasant subject for gossips, but from a scientific point of view, it is perfectly futile. If it is not the father, it is the mother; if it is not the grandmother, it is the grandfather; in fact, family influences can always be traced to some source or other, if the whole pedigree may be dug up and ransacked. But for that very reason they are of no scientific value whatever. They can neither be accounted for, nor can they be used to account for anything themselves. Even of twins, though very like each other in many respects, one may be phlegmatic, the other passionate. Some scientists, such as Weismann and others, have therefore denied, and I believe rightly, that any acquired characters, whether physical or mental, can ever be inherited by children from their parents. Whatever similarity there is, and there is plenty, is traced back by him to what he calls the germ-plasm, working on continuously in spite of all individual changes. If that germ-plasm is liable to certain peculiar modifications in the father or grandfather, it is liable to the same or similar modifications in the offspring, that is, if the father could become a drunkard, so could the son, only we must not think that the post hoc is here the same as the propter hoc. If we compare the germ-plasm to the molecules constituting the stem or branches of a vine, its grapes and leaves in their similarity and their variety would be comparable to the individuals belonging to the same family, and springing from the same family tree. But then the grape we see would not be what the grape of last year, or the grape immediately preceding it on the same branch, had made it, though there can be no doubt that the antecedent possibilities of the new grape were the same as those of the last. If one grape is blue, the next will be blue too, but no one would say that it was blue because the last grape was blue. The real cause would be that the molecules of the protoplasm have been so affected by long continued generation, that some of the peculiar qualities of the vine have become constant.

The child of a negro must always be a negro; his peculiarities are constant, though it may be quite true that the negro and other races are not different species, but only varieties rendered constant by immense periods of time. What the cause of these constant and inconstant peculiarities may be, not even Weismann has yet been able to explain satisfactorily.