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This has been made into a kind of pseudo- scientific doctrine by M. Zola, in the long series of his Rougon-Macquart novels. Hawthorne treated it with a more delicate and a serener art in "The House of the Seven Gables." It is curious to mark Hawthorne's attempts to break away from himself from the man that heredity, and circumstance, and the divine gift of genius had made him.
In this work the naturalism was generally characterized as "brutal," yet many critics admitted that it was absolutely true to nature. It had, in fact, all the gruesome accuracy of a clinical lecture. In 1868 came Madeleine Ferat, an exemplification of the doctrine of heredity, as inexorable as the "Destiny" of the Greek tragedies of old.
As to the heredity of cancer, all that can be said is that the burden of proof rests upon those who assert it. It is really curious how widespread the belief is that cancer "runs in families," and how exceedingly slender is the basis of evidence for such a belief. There are so many things that we do not know about cancer that any positive statement of any kind would be unbecoming.
Heredity is so powerful a factor in the development of the nervous organisation of the child that, realising its importance, we should be sparing in our criticism of the results which the mothers who consult us achieve in the training of their children.
They don't account for you." "Does anybody account for anybody else?" "Yes. You believe in heredity?" "I don't know enough about it." "You should read Haeckel The History of Evolution, and Herbert Spencer and Ribot's Heredity. It would interest you.... No, it wouldn't. It wouldn't interest you a bit." "It sounds as if it would rather."
Herein lies the great value of Wetzel's and Willmann's Monograph these authors report three cases in which criminal acts were attributed to abnormal mental life. The first case was that of a young man of twenty-three, who showed a psychopathic personality with tainted heredity on the paternal side. He was subject to convulsive attacks, which were regarded as hysterical and not epileptic.
But when Feller brought his armful of chrysanthemums to her on the veranda, there was no trace in her expression of the discovery she had made, and she wrote a direction on his pad in the usual fashion. As a boy, Arthur Lanstron had persisted in being an exception to the influences of both heredity and environment.
The whole point of the madman is that he is the exception that proves the rule. But Eugenics seeks to treat the whole rule as a series of exceptions to make all men mad. And on that ground there is hope for nobody; for all opinions have an author, and all authors have a heredity.
In fine, from all the broad field of pathology, the mists of tradition which have dimmed the fair name and reputation of heredity are slowly but surely lifting, until we now behold it, not as our worst enemy, but as our best friend in the prevention of disease and the upbuilding of the race.
Mr. Spencer and Mr. Lewes have even less conception of the connection between heredity and memory than Dr. Erasmus Darwin had at the close of the last century. Mr. Lewes' position was briefly this.
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