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If the critic had consulted Ribot's "Diseases of Memory," or some experienced physician, he might have written more justly. I do not feel myself competent to form a valuable opinion as to good art in writing, and I cannot help observing that the art doctors disagree wofully among themselves.
The above is mainly taken from M. Ribot's work on heredity rather than Dr. Carpenter's, because M. Ribot tells us that the head of the frog was actually cut off, a fact which does not appear so plainly in Dr. Carpenter's allusion to the same experiments. But Dr. Here is a frog whose right thigh you burn with acetic acid.
The books came down in two days: Herbert Spencer's First Principles, the Principles of Biology, the Principles of Psychology; Haeckel's History of Evolution; Maudsley's Body and Mind, Physiology and Pathology of Mind, Responsibility in Mental Disease; and Ribot's Heredity. Your instinct told you to read them in that order, controlling personal curiosity.
There was more heartburning over the conduct of the war. In France, M. Ribot's Government fell in September and was reconstituted under M. Painlevé. It succumbed in November to the effects of Caporetto, and France, like Italy, had to find a new Prime Minister. Her choice fell upon M. Clémenceau, a vigorous veteran of seventy-six.
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."
It is not necessary for me to enter into the psychological reason of this, but I strongly recommend those who are interested in the question to read the chapter in Ribot's work on this subject, "Essai sur L'Imagination Creatrice," as well as Mr. Keatinge's work on "Suggestion."
Returning to M. Ribot's own observations, we find he tells us that it usually requires three or four generations to fix the results of training, and to prevent a return to the instincts of the wild state.
Ribot's "Saint Sebastian" is one of the most powerful pictures of modern French art. Bonnat's "Christ" became at once famous. Each picture is painted with a vigor and point of realistic detail that are peculiar to our own time; painted to-day, Bonnat's fine and sculptural "Fellah Woman and Child," of the Metropolitan Museum, would be accented in a dozen ways in which now it is not.
As to M. Ribot's assertion, that to the heredity of modifications there are many exceptions, I readily agree with it, and can only say that it is exactly what I should expect; the lesson long since learnt by rote, and repeated in an infinite number of generations, would be repeated unintelligently, and with little or no difference, save from a rare accidental slip, the effect of which would be the culling out of the bungler who was guilty of it, or from the still rarer appearance of an individual of real genius; while the newer lesson would be repeated both with more hesitation and uncertainty, and with more intelligence; and this is well conveyed in M. Ribot's next sentence, for he says "It is only when variations have been firmly rooted; when having become organic, they constitute a second nature, which supplants the first; when, like instinct, they have assumed a mechanical character, that they can be transmitted."
Ribot's distinction between the animal's revival of images and the true creative combination of images in the mental life of children and of primitive man bears directly upon poetry, but even more suggestive to us is his diagram of the successive stages by which inventions come into being.
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