Are the dominant forces in the human germinative cells those which bring a contribution of beauty? One would say "yes," on the strength of the morphological history of humanity.
There is no intention of implying by this that humanity is tending toward the incarnation of perfectly beautiful human beings, all identical in their beauty; but they will be harmonious in those skeletal proportions that will insure perfect functional action of their organism. Harmony is fundamental; the soft tissues, the colour of hair and eyes, may upon this foundation give us an infinite variety of beauty. "Even in music," says Viola, "so long as the laws of harmony are respected, there are possibilities of melodic thoughts of infinite beauty in gradation and variety; but the first condition is that the aforesaid laws shall be respected."
The soft and plastic tissues are like a garment which may be infinitely varied: because life is richer in normal forms than in abnormal; richer in triumphs than in failures; and hence more impressive in the varieties of its beauties than in its monstrosities.
Such philosophic concepts of the medial man are exceedingly fertile in moral significance. The ugly and imperfect races have gone on through wars, conquests, intellectual and civil advancement unconsciously preparing new intermarriages and higher forms of love, which eliminated all that is harsh and inharmonic, in order to achieve the triumph of human beauty. In fact, quite aside from the heroic deeds of man, the constructor of civilisation, we are witnessing the coming of the unique man, the man of perfect beauty, such as Phidias visioned in a paroxysm of æsthetic emotion.
A living man who incarnates supreme beauty, supreme health, supreme strength: almost as though it were Christ himself whom humanity was striving to emulate, through a most intimate brotherhood of all the peoples on earth.
On the analogy of the medial morphological man, Quétélet also conceived of the medial intellectual man and the medial moral man.
The medial intellectual man is closely bound to the thoughts of his century; he incarnates the prevailing ideas of his time; he vibrates in response to the majority. He is to his nation and century, says Quétélet, "what the centre of gravity is to the body—namely, the one thing to be taken into consideration in order to understand the phenomena of equilibrium and movement." Considered from the ideal side, the medial man ought to centralise in himself and keep in equilibrium the movement of thought of his period, giving it harmonic form, in works of art or of science. And it is the capacity for accomplishing this work of synthesis that constitutes the inborn quality in the man of genius.
He does not create; he reassembles in one organism the scattered members, the medial vibrations of the crowd; he feels and expresses all that is new and beautiful and great that is in process of formation in the men who surround him, who are frequently unconscious of the beauty which is in them, just as they are unconscious of having those normal predetermined measurements of their bodies. But whenever they discover in a creation of thought something of themselves, they are stirred to enthusiasm at recognising this something belonging to them as forming part of a harmonious whole: and they applaud the work of art or of science which has stirred their enthusiasm. The medial intellectual man who has produced it is a beneficent genius to humanity because he aids its upward progress by appealing to the better part in each individual.
Now, there has never existed a medial intellectual man who sums up all the thought of his time: just as there does not exist a living man so beautiful as to incarnate all the medial measurements. But the man of genius is he who does embody the greater part of such ideas: and he produces a masterpiece when he succeeds in shedding his own individuality in order to assume what is given him from without. Goethe said that it was not he who composed Faust, but a spirit which invaded him. And the same thought is expressed in the autobiographies of many men of genius.