A vast
amount of idle evidence is quoted in favour of a proposition which seems
to have some _a priori_ plausibility. It is said--of course, without any
allusion to nurture, education, environment, opportunity--that such
extreme variations as we call genius are much commoner amongst men than
women: and then that the male sex also furnishes an undue proportion of
the insane--as if there were no unequal incidence of alcohol and
syphilis, the great factors of insanity, upon the two sexes.
Nevertheless, observant members of either sex will either contradict one
another on this point according to their particular opportunities, or
will, on further inquiry, agree that women vary surely no less generally
than men, at any rate within considerable limits, whatever may be the
facts of colossal genius. Indeed, we begin to perceive that differences
in external appearance, which no one supposes to be less general among
women than among men, merely reflect internal differences; and that, as
our faces differ, so do ourselves, every individual of either sex being,
in fact, not merely a peculiar variety, but the solitary example of that
variety--in short, unique. The analysis of the individual now being made
by experimental biology lends abundant support to this view of the
higher forms of life--the more abundant, the higher the form. So vast,
as yet quite incalculably vast, is the number of factors of the
individual, and such are the laws of their transmission in the
germ-cells, that the mere mathematical chances of a second identical
throw, so to speak, resulting in a second individual like any other, are
practically infinitely small.
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