achieving the highest success; but
their heritage is most unlikely to be transmitted in its entirety,
and ill-balanced compounds of the same constituents are usually of
little avail, and sometimes extraordinarily bad. A fourth reason is
that the highest imaginative power is dangerously near lunacy. If
one of the sanest of poets, Wordsworth, had, as he said, not
unfrequently to exert strength, as by shaking a gate-post, to gain
assurance that the world around him was a reality, his mind could not
at those times have been wholly sane. Sanity is difficult to define,
except negatively; but, even though we may be convinced of the truths
of the mystic, that nothing is what it seems to be, the
above-mentioned conduct suggests temporary insanity. It is sufficient
to conclude, as any Philistine would, that whoever has to shake a
gate-post to convince himself that it is not a vision is dangerously
near madness. Mad people do such things; those who carry on the work
of the world as useful and law-abiding citizens do not. I may add
that I myself had the privilege of hearing at first hand the
narrator's own account of this incident, which was much emphasized by
his gestures and tones. Wordsworth's unexpected sally was in reply to
a timid question by the late Professor Bonamy Price, then a young
man, concerning the exact meaning of the lines in his famous "Ode to
Immortality," "not for these I raise the song of praise; but for
those obstinate _questionings of sense and outward things_," etc.

I cannot speak from the present returns, but only from my own private
knowledge of the somewhat abnormal frequency with which eccentricity,
or other mental unsoundness, occurs in the families of very able
scientific men. Lombroso, as is well known, strongly asserted the
truth of this fact, but more strongly, as it seems to myself, than
the evidence warrants.

It is, therefore, not in the highest examples of human genius that
heredity can be most profitably studied, men of high, but not of the
highest, ability being more suitable. The only objection to their use
is that their names are, for the most part, unfamiliar to the public.

The vastness of the social world is very imperfectly grasped by its
several members, the large majority of the numerous persons who have
been eminent above their far more numerous fellows, each in his own
special department, being unknown to the generality. The merits of
such men can be justly appreciated only by r