The mind / by James Mark Baldwin.

  • James Mark Baldwin
Date:
[between 1898 and 1918?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mind / by James Mark Baldwin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    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 physio logical matter, in the sense that the son must in herit from his parents and their ancestors alone. But granted that two certain parents are his par¬ ents, 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 considera¬ tions in selecting his wife ? Does the coachman have an equal chance to get the heiress, or the blacksmith the clergyman’s daughter 1 Do we find inroads made in West End society by the ranchman and the tradesman’s clerk % And are not the inroads which we do find, the inroads made by the earls and the marquises, due to influences which are quite social and psychological ? Again, on the other hand, what leads the earl and the marquis to lay their titles at West End doors, while the ranchman and the tradesman’s 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 intrusion of social influences into the course of physical heredity. Bourget’s Cosmopolis is a picture of the influence of social