Heredity : a psychological study of its phenomena, laws, causes, and consequences / From the French of Th. Ribot.

  • Ribot, Th. (Théodule), 1839-1916.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Heredity : a psychological study of its phenomena, laws, causes, and consequences / From the French of Th. Ribot. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    105/460 (page 89)
    Heredity of the Sentiments and the Passions. 89 they call caouac, and when transported as slaves to America they try to procure a similar clay. There is scarce need to insist on the heredity of all that is connected with the sexual appetite. This passion is associated with an organ which depends on the law of heredity. A multitude of names famous in history offer themselves in support of our position. Augustus and the two Julias; Agrippina and Nero; Maroziaand Benedict IX. ; Alexander VI. and his children; Louise de Savoie and Francis I., etc. In all classes of society analogous facts may be found, and any one may know families in which this unfortunate disposition is hereditary. ' I knew,' says Prosper Lucas, ' a very handsome man, of an excellent constitution, but possessed of an unbridled passion for wine and women. He had a son, who, while yet but a lad, carried both these vices to excess. He carried off a mistress from his father, who never forgave the offence to the day of his death. This was the outset of his career ; he was afterwards ruined, and reduced to the utmost penury by harlots. His son died young, but incorrigible, and from the same vices as his father and grandfather.' ' But here,' says the same author, ' is a fact perhaps still more instructive. A man-cook, of great talent in his calling, has had all his life, and has still, at the age of sixty years, a passion for women. To this passion he adds unnatural crime. One of his natural sons, living apart from him, does not know even his father, and, though not yet quite nineteen, has from childhood given all the signs of extreme lust, and, strange to say, he, like his father, is equally addicted to either sex.' ^ There are also well-authenticated instances of a heredity of a propensity for rape. Droit (newspaper) states that in 1846, at Pontoise, a father, named Alexandre de M , was so unfortunate as to have his eldest son, barely sixteen years of age, violate and murder his cousin; and recently his second son attempted to violate a little girl. The punishment of these youths was mitigated, because it was proved at the trial that they were under the in¬ fluence of hereditary insanity. ^ ^ P. Lucas, i. 479. , ^ Ibid. i. 504.