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196
Hereditary Genius
the mother was the abler of the two parents. These are the mothers
of Bacon (remember also his four maternal aunts), of Buffon,
Condorcet, Cuvier, D'Alembert, Forbes, Gregory, and Watt. Both
Brodie and Jussieu had remarkable grandmothers. The eminent
relations of Newton were connected with him by female links.
It therefore appears to be very important to success in science, that
a man should have an able mother. I believe the reason to be, that a
child so circumstanced has the good fortune to be delivered from the
ordinary narrowing, partisan influences of home education. Our race
is essentially slavish; it is the nature of all of us to believe blindly in
what we love, rather than in that which we think most wise. We are
inclined to look upon an honest, unshrinking pursuit of truth as
something irreverent. We are indignant when others pry into our idols,
and criticise them with impunity, just as a savage flies to arms when a
missionary picks his fetish to pieces. Women are far more strongly
influenced by these feelings than men; they are blinder partisans and
more servile followers of custom. Happy are they whose mothers did
not intensify their naturally slavish dispositions in childhood, by the
frequent use of phrases such as, “Do not ask questions about this or
that, for it is wrong to doubt;” but who showed them, by practice and
teaching, that inquiry may be absolutely free without being irreverent,
that reverence for truth is the parent of free inquiry, and that
indifference or insincerity in the search after truth is one of the most
degrading of sins. It is clear that a child brought up under the
influences I have described is far more likely to succeed as a
scientific man than one who was reared under the curb of dogmatic
authority. Of two men with equal abilities, the one who had a truth-
loving mother would be the more likely to follow the career of
science; while the other, if bred up under extremely narrowing
circumstances, would become
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