and given to the world large portions
of its heritage of truth. What can set limit to the possible
variations of fruitful intellectual power? Rare such variations--that
is their law: the greater the variation, the more rare! But so is
genius; the greater, the more rare. As to the rat with the human hand,
he would not be left to starve and decay in his hole; he would be put
in alcohol when he died, and kept in a museum! And the lesson which he
would teach to the wise biologist would be that here in this rat
Nature had shown her genius by discounting in advance the slow
processes of evolution!

It is, indeed, the force of such considerations as these which have
led to many justifications of the positions that the genius is quite
out of connection with the social movement of his time. The genius
brings his variations to society whether society will or no; and as to
harmony between them, that is a matter of outcome rather than of
expectation or theory. We are told the genius comes as a
brain-variation; and between the physical heredity which produces him
and the social heredity which sets the tradition of his time there is
no connection.

But this is not tenable, as we have reason to think, from the
interaction which actually takes place between physical and social
heredity. To be sure, the heredity of the individual is a
physiological matter, in the sense that the son must inherit from his
parents and their ancestors alone. But granted that two certain
parents are his parents, we may ask how these two certain parents came
to be his parents. How did his father come to marry his mother, and
the reverse? This is distinctly a social question; and to its solution
all the currents of social influence and suggestion contribute. Who is
free from social considerations in selecting his wife? Does the
coachman have an equal chance to get the heiress, or the blacksmith
the clergyman's daughter? Do we find inroads made in Newport society
by the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk? And are not the inroads which
we do find, the inroads made by the counts and the marquises, due to
influences which are quite social and psychological? Again, on the
other hand, what leads the count and the marquis, to lay their titles
at Newport doors, while the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk keep
away, but the ability of both these types of suitors to estimate their
chances just on social and psychological grounds? Novelists have rung
the changes on this