ese would be little short of pure
miracles. They would be equivalent to the sudden creation, without
antecedent cause, of a whole vast system of nerves and nerve-centres in
the prodigious brain of some infant phenomenon.

On the other hand, much of the commonplace, shallow fashionable talk
about hereditary genius--I don't mean, of course, the talk of our
Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap drawing-room philosophy of easy
sciolists who can't understand them--is itself fully as absurd in its
own way as the idea that something can come out of nothing. For it is no
explanation of the existence of genius to say that it is hereditary.
You only put the difficulty one place back. Granting that young Alastor
Jones is a budding poet because his father, Percy Bysshe Jones, was a
poet before him, why, pray, was Jones the elder a poet at all, to start
with? This kind of explanation, in fact, explains nothing; it begins by
positing the existence of one original genius, absolutely unaccounted
for, and then proceeds blandly to point out that the other geniuses
derive their characteristics from him, by virtue of descent, just as all
the sons of a peer are born honourables. The elephant supports the
earth, and the tortoise supports the elephant, but who, pray, supports
the tortoise? If the first chicken came out of an egg, what was the
origin of the hen that laid it?

Besides, the allegation as it stands is not even a true one. Genius, as
we actually know it, is by no means hereditary. The great man is not
necessarily the son of a great man or the father of a great man: often
enough, he stands quite isolated, a solitary golden link in a chain of
baser metal on either side of him. Mr. John Shakespeare woolstapler, of
Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, was no doubt an eminently respectable
person in his own trade, and he had sufficient intelligence to be mayor
of his native town once upon a time: but, so far as is known, none of
his literary remains are at all equal to _Macbeth_ or _Othello_. Parson
Newton, of the Parish of Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, may have preached
a great many very excellent and convincing discourses, but there is no
evidence of any sort that he ever attempted to write the _Principia_.
_Per contra_ the Miss Miltons, good young ladies that they were (though
of conflicting memory), do not appear to have differed conspicuously in
ability from the other Priscillas and Patiences and Mercies amongst whom
their lot was cast;