Take a number of good, strong, powerful stocks, mentally
or physically, endowed with something more than the average amount of
energy and application. Let them be as varied as possible in
characteristics; and, so far as convenient, try to include among them a
considerable small-change of races, dispositions, professions, and
temperaments. Mix, by marriage, to the proper consistency; educate the
offspring, especially by circumstances and environment, as broadly,
freely, and diversely as you can; let them all intermarry again with
other similarly produced, but personally unlike, idiosyncrasies; and
watch the result to find your genius in the fourth or fifth generation.
If the experiment has been properly performed, and all the conditions
have been decently favourable, you will get among the resultant five
hundred persons a considerable sprinkling of average fools, a fair
proportion of modest mediocrities, a small number of able people, and
(in case you are exceptionally lucky and have shuffled your cards very
carefully) perhaps among them all a single genius. But most probably the
genius will have died young of scarlet fever, or missed fire through
some tiny defect of internal brain structure. Nature herself is trying
this experiment unaided every day all around us, and, though she makes a
great many misses, occasionally she makes a stray hit and then we get a
Shakespeare or a Grimaldi.
'But you haven't proved all this: you have only suggested it.
Pages:
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410