Facts and arguments on the transmission of intellectual and moral qualities from parents to offspring.

Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Facts and arguments on the transmission of intellectual and moral qualities from parents to offspring. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    versally, and as well liere as elsewhere, he might acquire the direction of events, by discovering the laws regulating their successions. In the seclusion of his study, from his observation of men, and from his own consciousness, man endeavours to explain the phenomena of the diver- sity of human intellect; by which means he often involves the subject in a more inextricable maze than he found il. Whereas, if, instead of the closet and the forum, he were to go into the nursery, and study nature at her fountain-head, endeavouring to trace to the true cause, the diversity of disposition and cha- racter he found there, he would be much more likely to arrive at the truth than by any other method. He must, however, take the mother to his council, for she only can explain that which to the observer would appear a mystery;—not a trait of character, not a propensity, not a peculiarity of any kind, but the mother knows, or ought to know, how it originated. Where is the parent who has indured the heart- burning occasioned by the waywardness of children, or the agony of soul, suffered by their constant pur- suit in vicious courses, with the conviction continually forcing itself on his mind, that evil and not good is innate in them, that would not have hailed as a mes- senger from heaven, a voice which could have warned him°how to avoid much of this misery? Yet there is such a voice audible throughout all animated nature—else this world were not the creation of an all-wise omnipotence. 2