Heredity, variation and genius : with essay on Shakespeare, "Testimonied in his own bringingsforth," and address on Medicine, present and prospective / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Maudsley, Henry, 1835-1918
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Heredity, variation and genius : with essay on Shakespeare, "Testimonied in his own bringingsforth," and address on Medicine, present and prospective / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/236 (page 7)
    flux is pretty well restricted to the human line of progress, man’s dominant ascendency having made a hostile environment which has stopped natural progress in the lower animals, although not per¬ haps in all the minutest forms of microbal life which still fight him not unsuccessfully and may conceivably one day be victorious. How can variational shoots of parent stems, such as once grew into different species of living things, take effect now in face of a man-made environment, uniformly adverse, which checks variation and prevents differentiating adaptation ? In the animal kingdom it has come practically to this— that the lower animals are reduced to the self¬ conservative instinct ; in man only does the per¬ fective instinct work. He is, so to speak, the supreme branch of the tree of life in which the ascending sap yet stirs active growth, the present and perhaps final culmination of organic develop¬ ment on his planet ; which in truth may well be the case, seeing how successfully he has absorbed and exploited all lower organic being and what small likelihood there is of the advent of higher being to absorb and exploit him. Asking whence this force of organic evolution is derived, the answer is simple enough if the enquirer be content to stay in secondary causes. It is plainly due to the innumerable minute and perpetually beating pulses of the sun’s rays upon living protoplasm from its earliest and simplest up to its latest and most complex development ;