Idiosyncrasy E-Book

Charles Grant Allen

• Herausgeber: EHS
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Französisch

Seitenzahl: 70

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Every man, in the true Greek sense of the term, is an idiosyncrasy. He is a syncrasis, because he derives all his attributes, physical or mental, from two parents, or four grandparents, or eight great-grandparents, and so forth. But at the same time he is an idio-syncrasis, because that particular mixture is eminently unlikely ever to have occurred before, or ever to occur again, even in his own brothers or sisters. That he is and can be at birth nothing more than such a crasis, that he cannot conceivably contain anything more, on the mental side at least, than was contained in his antecedents, is the thesis which this paper sets out to maintain.
Take a thousand red beans and a thousand white beans; shake them all up in a bag together for five minutes, and then pour them out in a square space on a billiard-table just big enough to contain them in a layer one deep. Each time you do so, your product will be the same in general outline and appearance: it will be a quadrangular figure composed of beans, having throughout the same approximate thickness. But it will be a mixture of red beans and white in a certain order; and the chances against the same order occurring twice will be very great indeed. Make the beans ten thousand of each so as to cover the table ten deep, and the chance of getting the same order twice decreases proportionately. Make them a hundred thousand each, and it becomes infinitesimal. You have practically each time not only a synerasis but an idio-syncrasis as well.
Now, a human being is the product of innumerable elements, derived directly from two parents, and indirectly from an infinity of earlier ancestors; elements not of two orders only, but of infinite orders; combined together, apparently, not on the principle of both contributing equally to each part, but of a sort of struggle between the two for the mastery in each part. Here, elements derived from the father's side seem to carry the day; there, again, elements derived from the mother's side gain the victory; and yonder, once more, a compromise has been arrived at between the two, so that the offspring in that particular part is a mean of his paternal and maternal antecedents...

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (February 24, 1848 – October 25, 1899) was a Canadian science writer and novelist, educated in England. He was a public promoter of evolution in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Ely Van de Warker (1841–1910) American gynecologist

Leseprobe

Idiosyncrasy

Idiosyncrasy

Habits and Individualities

Idiosyncrasy{1}

Every man, in the true Greek sense of the term, is an idiosyncrasy. He is a syncrasis, because he derives all his attributes, physical or mental, from two parents, or four grandparents, or eight great-grandparents, and so forth. But at the same time he is an idio-syncrasis, because that particular mixture is eminently unlikely ever to have occurred before, or ever to occur again, even in his own brothers or sisters. That he is and can be at birth nothing more than such a crasis, that he cannot conceivably contain anything more, on the mental side at least, than was contained in his antecedents, is the thesis which this paper sets out to maintain.

Take a thousand red beans and a thousand white beans; shake them all up in a bag together for five minutes, and then pour them out in a square space on a billiard-table just big enough to contain them in a layer one deep. Each time you do so, your product will be the same in general outline and appearance: it will be a quadrangular figure composed of beans, having throughout the same approximate thickness. But it will be a mixture of red beans and white in a certain order; and the chances against the same order occurring twice will be very great indeed. Make the beans ten thousand of each so as to cover the table ten deep, and the chance of getting the same order twice decreases proportionately. Make them a hundred thousand each, and it becomes infinitesimal. You have practically each time not only a synerasis but an idio-syncrasis as well.

Now, a human being is the product of innumerable elements, derived directly from two parents, and indirectly from an infinity of earlier ancestors; elements not of two orders only, but of infinite orders; combined together, apparently, not on the principle of both contributing equally to each part, but of a sort of struggle between the two for the mastery in each part. Here, elements derived from the father's side seem to carry the day; there, again, elements derived from the mother's side gain the victory; and yonder, once more, a compromise has been arrived at between the two, so that the offspring in that particular part is a mean of his paternal and maternal antecedents. Under such circumstances, absolute equality of result in any two cases is almost inconceivable. It would imply absolute equality of conditions between myriads of jarring and adverse elements, such as we never actually find in nature, and such as we can hardly believe possible under any actual concrete circumstances.

The case of twins comes nearer to such exact equality of conditions than any other with which we are acquainted. Here, the varying health and vigor of the two parents, or the difference between their respective functional activities at two given times, are reduced to a minimum; and we get in many instances a very close similarity indeed. Yet even among twins, the offspring of the same father and mother, produced at the same moment of time, there are always at least some differences, mental and physical; while the differences are occasionally very great. A competent observer, who knew the Siamese twins, informed me that differences of disposition were quite marked in their case, where training and after-circumstances could have had little or nothing to do with them, inasmuch as both must have been subjected to all but absolutely identical conditions of life throughout. One was described as taciturn and morose, the other as lively and good-humored. Whether anything of the same sort has been noticed in the pair of negro girls called the Two-headed Nightingale, I do not know, but, to judge from their photographs, there would seem to be some distinct physical diversities in height and feature. We can only account for these diversities in twins generally by supposing that in that intimate intermixture of elements derived from one or other parent, which we have learned from Darwin, Spencer, and Galton, takes place in every impregnation of an ovum, slightly different results have occurred in one case and in the other. To use Darwin's phraseology, some gemmules of the paternal side have here ousted some gemmules of the maternal side, or vice versa; to use Mr. Spencer's (which to my judgment seems preferable), the polarities of one physiological unit have here carried the day over those of another.

But why under such nearly identical conditions should there be such diversity of result? Let us answer the question by another: Why, with a thousand red and a thousand white balls, shaken together with an equal energy by a machine (if you will), and poured out on our billiard-table, should there be a similar diversity? The fact is, you cannot get absolute identity of conditions in any two cases. Imagine yourself mixing two fluids together with a spoon, as regularly as you choose; can you possibly make the currents in the two exactly alike twice running? And here in the case of humanity you have not to deal with simple red beans or with simple fluids, but with very complex gemmules or very complex physiological units.

If even in twins we cannot expect perfect similarity, still less can we expect it in mere ordinary brothers and sisters. Here, innumerable minor physiological conditions of either parent may affect the result in infinite ways. Not, indeed, that there is any sufficient reason for supposing passing states of health and so forth directly to impress themselves upon the heredity of the offspring; but one can readily understand that, in a process which is essentially a mixture of elements, small varieties of external circumstances may vastly alter the nature of the result. Shake the bag of beans once, and you get one arrangement; shake it once more, and you get another and very different one. To this extent, and to this extent only, as it seems to me, chance in the true sense enters into the composition of an individuality. The possible elements which may go to make up the mental constitution of any person are (as I shall try to show) strictly limited to all those elements, actual or latent, which exist in the two persons of his parents; but the particular mixture of those elements which will come out in him—the number to be selected and the number to be rejected out of all the possible combinations—will depend upon that minute interaction of small physical causes, working unseen, which we properly designate by the convenient name of chance. In this sense, it is not a chance that William Jones, the son of two English parents, is born an Englishman in physique and mental peculiarities, rather than a Chinese or a negro; nor is it a chance that he is born essentially a compound of his ancestors on the Jones side and on the Brown side, but it is a chance that he is born a boy rather than a girl; and it is a chance that he is born himself rather than his brother John or his brother Thomas. If we knew all, we could point out exactly why this result and not any other result occurred just there and then; but, as we do not know all, we fairly say that the result is in so far a chance one. And, even if we knew all, we should still be justified in using the same language, for it marks a real difference in causation. William Jones is an Englishman and a Jones-Brown strictly in virtue of his being the son of Henry Jones and Mary Brown; but so are all his brothers and (mutatis mutandis) his sisters too. He is himself, and not one of his brothers or his sisters, in virtue of certain minute molecular arrangements, occurring between certain elements for the most part essentially identical with the elements which went to make up the other members of his family. To be metaphorical once more, one may say that a Robinson differs from a Jones because he is a mixture of brown peas and white peas; whereas one Jones differs from another in being a particular mixture of red beans and black beans, differently arranged in each case.