Then, again, who can say how much of a great man's greatness is due to his natural abilities with which he was born, and how much is due to the force of example, to family tradition, to education, to his own application, and the concurrence of circumstances? It is in no man's power to tell, nor in any scientist's power to ascertain. It is a common remark that great men in general owe their greatness chiefly to their mothers, and that, in the great majority of cases known, eminent men have had gifted mothers. This, if a fact, is against Mr. Galton's theory; for the father, not the mother, transmits the hereditary character of the offspring, the hereditary qualities of the line, if the physiologists are to be believed. Hence nobility in all civilized nations follows the father, not the mother. The fact of great men owing their greatness more to the mother is explained by her greater influence in forming the mind, in moulding the character, in stimulating and directing the exercise of her son's faculties, than that of the father. It is as educator in the largest sense that the mother forms her son's character and influences his destiny. It is her womanly instincts, affection, and care and vigilance, her ready sympathy, her love, her tenderness, and power to inspire a noble ambition, kindle high and generous aspirations in the breast of her son, that do the work.
Even if it were uniformly true that great men have always descended from parents remarkable for their natural abilities, Mr. Galton's theory that genius is hereditary could not be concluded with scientific certainty. The hereditary transmission of genius might indeed seem probable; but, on the empirical principles of the scientists, it could not be asserted. All that could be asserted would be the relation of concomitance or of juxtaposition, not the relation of cause and effect. The relation of cause and effect is not and cannot, as the scientists tell us, be empirically apprehended. How can they know that the genius of the son is derived hereditarily from the greatness of his progenitors? From the juxtaposition or concomitance of two facts empirically apprehended there is no possible logic by which it can be inferred that the one is the cause of the other. Hence, Mr. Herbert Spencer, Stuart Mill, Sir William Hamilton, Professor Huxley, and the positivists follow Hume, and relegate, as we said, causes to the region of the unknowable. In fact, the scientists, if they speak of the relation of cause and effect, mean by it only the relation of juxtaposition in the order of precedence and consequence. Hence, on their own principles, though the facts they assert and describe may be true, none of their conclusions from them, or hypotheses to explain them, have or can have any scientific validity. For, after all, there may be a real cause on which the facts depend, and which demands an entirely different explanation from the one which the scientists offer.
We refuse, therefore, to accept Mr. Galton's hypothesis that genius is hereditary, because the facts he adduces are not all the facts in the case, because there are facts which are not consistent with it, and because he does not show and cannot show that it is the only hypothesis possible for the explanation even of the facts which he alleges. Even his friendly and able reviewer, Dr. Meredith Clymer, concludes his admirable analysis by saying, "A larger induction is necessary before any final decision can be had on the merits of the question." This is the verdict of one of the most scientific minds in the United States, and it is the Scotch verdict, not proven. Yet Mr. Galton would have us accept his theory as science, and on its strength set aside the teachings of revelation and the universal beliefs of mankind. This is the way of all non-Christian scientists of the day, and it is because the church refuses to accept their unverified and unverifiable hypotheses, and condemns them for asserting them as true, that they accuse her of being hostile to modern science. They make certain investigations, ascertain certain facts, imagine certain hypotheses, which are nothing but conjectures, put them forth as science, and then demand that she accept them, and give up her faith so far as incompatible with them. A very reasonable demand indeed!
Press these proud scientists closely, and they will own that as yet their sciences are only tentative, that as yet they are not in a condition to prove absolutely their theories, or to verify their conjectures, but they are in hopes they soon will be. At present, science is only in its infancy, it has only just entered upon the true method of investigation; but it is every day making surprising progress, and there is no telling what marvellous conclusions it will soon arrive at. All this might pass, if it did not concern matters of life and death, heaven and hell. The questions involved are too serious to be sported with, too pressing to wait the slow and uncertain solutions of the tentative science which, during six thousand years, has really made no progress in solving them. The scientists retard science when they ask from it the solution, either affirmative or negative, of questions which confessedly lie not in its province, and dishonor and degrade it when they put forth as science their crude conjectures, or their unverified and unverifiable hypotheses. They, not we, are the real enemies of science, though it would require a miracle to make them see it. Deluded mortals! they start with assumptions that exclude the very possibility of science, and then insist that what they assert or deny shall be accepted by theologians and philosophers as established with scientific certainty! Surely the apostle must have had them in mind when he said of certain men that, "esteeming themselves wise, they became fools."
Genius is not hereditary in Mr. Galton's sense, nor are a man's natural abilities derived by inheritance in the way he would have us believe; for both belong to the soul, not to the body; and the soul is created, not generated. Only the body is generated, and only in what is generated is there natural inheritance. All the facts Mr. Galton adduces we are prepared to admit; but we deny his explanation. We accept, with slight qualifications, his views as summed up by Dr. Clymer in the following passage:
"The doctrine of the pretensions of natural equality in intellect, which teaches that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort, is daily contradicted by the experiences of the nursery, schools, universities, and professional careers. There is a definite limit to the muscular powers of every man, which he cannot by any training or exertion overpass. It is only the novice gymnast who, noting his rapid daily gain of strength and skill, believes in illimitable development; but he learns in time that his maximum performance becomes a rigidly-determinate quantity. The same is true of the experience of the student in the working of his mental powers. The eager boy at the outset of his career is astonished at his rapid progress; he thinks for a while that every thing is within his grasp; but he too soon finds his place among his fellows; he can beat such and such of his mates, and run on equal terms with others, while there will be always some whose intellectual and physical feats he cannot approach. The same experience awaits him when he enters a larger field of competition in the battle of life; let him work with all his diligence, he cannot reach his object; let him have opportunities, he cannot profit by them; he tries and is tried, and he finally learns his gauge—what he can do, and what lies beyond his capacity. He has been taught the hard lesson of his weakness and his strength; he comes to rate himself as the world rates him; and he salves his wounded ambition with the conviction that he is doing all his nature allows him. An evidence of the enormous inequality between the intellectual capacity of men is shown in the prodigious differences in the number of marks obtained by those who gain mathematical honors at the University of Cambridge, England. Of the four hundred or four hundred and fifty students who take their degrees each year, about one hundred succeed in gaining honors in mathematics, and these are ranged in strict order of merit. Forty of them have the title of 'wrangler,' and to be even a low wrangler is a creditable thing. The distinction of being the first in this list of honors, or 'senior wrangler' of the year, means a great deal more than being the foremost mathematician of four hundred or four hundred and fifty men taken at haphazard. Fully one half the wranglers have been boys of mark at their schools. The senior wrangler of the year is the chief of these as regards mathematics. The youths start on their three-years' race fairly, and their run is stimulated by powerful inducements; at the end they are examined rigorously for five and a half hours a day for eight days. The marks are then added up, and the candidates strictly rated in a scale of merit. The precise number of marks got by the senior wrangler, in one of the three years given by Mr. Galton, is 7634; by the second wrangler, 4123; and by the lowest man in the list of honors, 237. The senior wrangler, consequently, had nearly twice as many marks as the second, and more than thirty-two times as many as the lowest man. In the other examinations given, the results do not materially differ. The senior wrangler may, therefore, be set down as having thirty-two times the ability of the lowest men on the lists; or, as Mr. Galton puts it, 'he would be able to grapple with problems more than thirty-two times as difficult; or, when dealing with subjects of the same difficulty, but intelligible to all, would comprehend them more rapidly in, perhaps, the square-root of that proportion.' But the mathematical powers of the ultimate man on the honors-list, which are so low when compared with those of the foremost man, are above mediocrity when compared with the gifts of Englishmen generally; for, though the examination places one hundred honor-men above him, it puts no less than three hundred 'poll-men' below him. Admitting that two hundred out of three hundred have refused to work hard enough to earn honors, there will remain one hundred who, had they done their possible, never could have got them.
"The same striking intellectual differences between man and man are found in whatever way ability may be tested, whether in statesmanship, generalship, literature, science, poetry, art. The evidence furnished by Mr. Galton's book goes to show in how small degree eminence in any class of intellectual powers can be considered as due to purely special faculties. It is the result of concentrated efforts made by men widely gifted—of grand human animals; of natures born to achieve greatness."
We are far from pretending that all men are born with equal abilities, and that all souls are created with equal possibilities, or that every child comes into the world a genius in germ. We believe that all men are born with equal natural rights, and that all should be equal before the law, however various and unequal may be their acquired or adventitious rights; but that is all the equality we believe in. No special effort or training in the world, under the influence of the most favorable circumstances, can make every child a St. Augustine, a St. Thomas, a Bossuet, a Newton, a Leibnitz, a Julius Cæsar, a Wellington, a Napoleon. As one star differeth from another in glory, so does one soul differ from another in its capacities on earth as well as in its blessedness in heaven. Here we have no quarrel with Mr. Galton. We are by no means believers in the late Robert Owen's doctrine, that you can make all men equal if you will only surround them from birth with the same circumstances, and enable them to live in parallelograms.
We are prepared to go even farther, and to recognize that the distinction between noble and ignoble, gentle and simple, recognized in all ages and by all nations, is not wholly unfounded. There is as great a variety and as great an inequality in families as in individuals. Aristocracy is not a pure prejudice; and though it has no political privileges in this country, yet it exists here no less than elsewhere, and it is well for us that it does. No greater evil could befall any country than to have no distinguished families rising, generation after generation, above the common level; no born leaders of the people, who stand head and shoulders above the rest; and the great objection to democracy is, that it tends to bring all down to a general average, and to place the administration of public interests in the hands of a low mediocrity, as our American experience, in some measure, proves. The demand of the age for equality of conditions and possessions is most mischievous. If all were equally rich, all would be equally poor; and if all were at the top of society, society would have no bottom, and would be only a bottomless pit. If there were none devoted to learning, no strength and energy of character above the multitude, society would be without leaders, and would soon fall to pieces, as an army of privates without officers.
There is no doubt that there are noble lines, and the descendants of noble ancestors do, as a rule, though not invariably, surpass the descendants of plebeian or undistinguished lines. The Stanleys, for instance, have been distinguished in British history for at least fifteen generations. The present Earl Derby, the fifteenth earl of his house, is hardly inferior to his gifted father, and nobly sustains the honors of his house. We expect more from the child of a good family than from the child of a family of no account, and hold that birth is never to be decried or treated as a matter of no importance. But we count it so chiefly because it secures better breeding, and subjection to higher, nobler, and purer formative influences, from the earliest moment. Example and family traditions are of immense reach in forming the character, and it is not a little to have constantly presented to the consideration of the child the distinguished ability, the eminent worth and noble deeds of a long line of illustrious ancestors, especially in an age and country where blood is highly esteemed, and the honorable pride of family is cultivated. The honor and esteem in which a family has been held for its dignity and worth through several generations is a capital, an outfit for the son, secures him, in starting, the advantage of less well-born competitors, and all the aid in advance of a high position and the good-will of the community. More is exacted of him than of them; he is early made to feel that noblesse oblige, and that failure would in his case be dishonor. He is thereby stimulated to greater effort to succeed.
Yet we deny not that there is something else than all this in blood. A man's genius belongs to his soul, and is no more inherited than the soul itself. But man is not all soul, any more than he is all body; body and soul are in close and mysterious relation, and in this life neither acts without the other. The man's natural abilities are psychical, not physical, and are not inherited, because the soul is created, not generated; but their external manifestation may depend, in a measure, on organization, and organization is inherited. Mr. Galton's facts may, then, be admitted without our being obliged to accept his theory. The brain is generally considered by physiologists as the organ of the mind, and it may be so, without implying that the brain secretes thought, will, affection, as the liver secretes bile, or the stomach secretes the gastric juice.