Reversion (heredity)

“ Numerous abnormal tendencies, among them misanthropy in women, can be traced back to these causes. Finally they have been brought up in a home where they have suffered from the burden of bad examples, or conflicting influences.
So strong has the conviction of the meaning of heredity become that young men, who have themselves borne a burden, imposed by generations of one character or another, have begun to see that it is [Pg 49] their duty rather to abstain from marriage than to transmit their unfortunate inheritence to a new generation. ”

“ The first of these is the fact of heredity; the second the fact that hereditary endowment, whether for good or for evil, or, as is the rule, both for good and for evil, goes vastly further than any one has until lately realized, in determining individual destiny. ”

“ If what we call heredity were a matter of a few months,—a narrow, pitiful, two-parent affair,—if the fate of a human being could be shut in with what one man and one woman, playing and working, eating and drinking, under heaven, for a score of years or more, would be likely to have to give him from out of their very selves, heredity would certainly be a whimsical, unjust, undignified law to come into a world by, to don an immortal soul with. ”

“ But soul is immortal and parentless; hence this objection is without a root.
Some urge that Heredity invalidates Reïncarnation. We urge it as proof. Heredity in giving us a body in any family provides the appropriate environment for the Ego. The Ego only goes into the family which either completely answers to its whole nature, or which gives an opportunity for the working out of its evolution, and which is also connected with it by reason of past incarnations or causes mutually set up. ”

“ He marries some honest girl by and by and thus associates, with the burnt-out dregs of his life, one who would loathe him did she know his true character and his concealed but burning flame of insanely inherited, insanely indulged, bestially developed disease. But he is now—under the shadow of social respectability and church sanction—to perpetuate his unfortunate mania in those who are helpless—the unborn. Heredity is not a slip-shod thing. It does not follow One parent and one alone. ”

“ If the head of a family has left to his wife in reversion after his son the life-interest in the female slaves, and has made no mention of any other reversionary heir, if the son dies, the woman shall not lose her life-interest. ”

“ I do say, however, that with the cruel and hopeless law of heredity as laid down by Zola and Ibsen I have little sympathy. According to these pessimists, who ride heredity to death, we inherit only the vices, the weaknesses, and the diseases of our ancestors. If this, however, were really the case, the world would be growing worse and not better, as it assuredly is, with every succeeding generation. ”

“ The relationship of your wife to me made the contemplated sin no greater, but rendered it more tasteless.
“Had I gone away with you as I consented to do, the world would have said, she but follows her fatal inheritance—like mother like daughter. There were some bitter rebellious hours, when that thought came to me. But to-day light has shone upon me, and I know there is a law of Divine Heredity which is greater and more powerful than any tendency we derive from parents or grandparents. I have believed much in creeds all my life ”

“ Adams Brown: “The idea of inherited guilt can be accepted only if paralleled by the idea of inherited good. The consequences of sin have often been regarded as social, while the consequences of good have been regarded as only individual. But heredity transmits both good and evil.” ”

“ If I were to tell you that you have not transmitted to an innocent girl the fatal inheritance which has weighed like a curse upon your life, how would it be with you?"
"It would be heaven--it would be light! Unconscious sinner as I am, it might mean forgiveness!" ”

“ While it is true that too much importance cannot be placed upon the subject of heredity, the inheritance which we receive not only from our parents and grandparents but even from our great-grandparents, and while it is true that all that can be acquired in character and culture, both intellectual and physical, is transmitted from the parents to their children ”

“ It teaches that hereditary tendencies can be overcome; that one can conquer passion and impulse by the use of the Divine inheritance of Will, and compel public respect by lofty ideals; in other words, that one may rise on the "stepping-stones of a dead self to higher things." ”

“ She would have taught the simple religion of respect for the loan God has made in giving their bodies a soul, and she would have watched for possible signs of ill, and would finally have guided each one through the dangerous age on to the time when every man and woman must answer for himself and herself.
Heredity is sometimes stronger than even the wisest bringing up; but who can say how many families might not have been saved and kept together by a prudent and understanding mother’s love? ”

“ With these awful facts and illustrations of the power and persistence of heredity before us, we must recognize that we are doomed before we are born, must we not? If there is, as you say, no escape from our heredity and its power and influence, what is the use of trying? ”

“ Insanity, gout, and melancholia, frequently skip a generation and reappear when hopes have been entertained that the evil trait had died out in the family. A son may resemble his mother very markedly, and have children with the features and character of his father. The evidence of heredity is thus borne out frequently in the long-run, when to a contracted view it would seem at fault. An individual inherits not only from his parents but from all their predecessors in the line of life, and just what of them shall appear evidently in him, and what be hidden in unconsciousness, none can tell. ”

“ HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE 1 THE law of heredity which insists that the descendants shall suffer by the faults and profit by the virtues of their ancestors comprises truths that are no longer disputed. They shine forth, visible to the eyes of all. The child of a drunkard will bear the burden of his father’s vice all his life long, from the day of his birth to that of his death, in body and in mind. ”

“ But her business in life was the inheritance of the earth, and, however much she might respect me—or by so much the more—she would recognise that I was a force to deflect her from the right line—"a disease for me," she had said. ”

“ Your philosophy is pretty enough, but it is not practical. The whole fault lies in our old-fashioned system of inheritance, the elder male of a family getting all the estate and the younger ones nothing at all. ”

“ How can I wish for more?"
Praise God for the cleansing which reaches our inmost soul and saves to the uttermost! It, therefore, readers, is impossible for the heir to become dissatisfied with the inheritance. ”

“ Many unexplained freaks of reversion become intelligible when we remember that any sight or sound which was associated in the ancestry with certain emotions tends to revive those emotions in sensitive descendants. ”

“ I was left on the world, a nameless, penniless outcast, with one fatal inheritance—God knows, I can speak of it without vanity, after what I have gone through!—the inheritance of my mother’s beauty.
“My only friends were the poor starved-out players. ”

“ Whether due to my reading, or almost wholly to observations and conclusions, I cannot say, but I began early to feel the potency of heredity; to lament certain tendencies in my kindred which I saw cropping out in myself, and to realize the gravity of marrying and having offspring. I saw my grandfather’s ungovernable temper exaggerated in one of his daughters and in my brother; saw in myself, though naturally of a mild disposition, a tendency to give away, on occasion, to intense anger ”

“ A crisis was rapidly approaching which there was no way of escaping—unless the birth of a child might soften her brother's heart, and, perchance, re-open the vista of a great inheritance in the years to come. ”

“ The being disinherited does not terrify him at all. He has a more abiding inheritance, and is willing naked to follow a naked Christ.—Dear Sir, let me advise you to do nothing rashly. If you can pray for a blessing on your will when you are about to disinherit your son, I shall wonder. ”

“ We inherit thoughts as we inherit wealth; we inherit customs and laws and forms of worship, and indeed [Pg 30] our whole mental furniture; we can add enormously to our inheritance, and can transmit the augmented fund to our descendants. But the other process of inheritance, to which the word "heredity" is taken to apply, is not, immediately at least, cumulative. We inherit the old faculties, bodily and mental, unaltered, or with infinitesimal alterations, though we live in a different environment, and are ourselves as much altered as our environment. ”

“ I have nothing of myself to offer Thee but what is corrupt and evil, but Thou hast given me by inheritance all the poverty and humility of Thy Blessed Mother, all her sorrows,—and these I offer Thee—Thy gift I give back to Thee. ”

“ Those of us whose attention has been fixed upon the working of the law of heredity until it appears to us to run its course, unmodified and unlimited by other laws, may well be pardoned for regarding with doubtful eye a scheme which has, for its very first condition, the regeneration of the vicious; of the vicious by inherited propensity.
THE LAW AGAINST US—HABIT.
Use is second nature, we say. ”

“ We look to the dark side of the law of heredity for our warning. It makes us solemnly thoughtful in view of our power over the race in the transmitted result from our own wrongdoing; and then, when we feel overwhelmed and discouraged, we turn towards the Gospel of Heredity and take hope from the fact that good is transmissible; and, more than that, we have it in our power so to modify our own characters, tendencies and habits that we can, in all probability, give our children a better dower than we received, and the earlier in life we begin this making over of ourselves the better. ”

“ But how can we bring the soul down on the sense plane when it is ethereal and finer than anything that we can perceive with our senses?
Those who try to explain the cause of our earthly life by the theory of heredity do not believe in the truth of transmigration. The modern scientists, agnostics and materialists generally accept the theory of heredity and endeavor to explain everything by it; but if we examine their arguments for the theory of heredity, we shall find that the theory of transmigration is much more satisfactory, much more rational than that of heredity. ”

“ Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 88—“Heredity and individual action may combine their forces and so intensify one or more of the inherited motives that the form is affected by it and the effect may be transmitted to the offspring. So conflict of inheritances may lead to the institution of variety. Accumulation of impulses may lead to sudden revolution, and the species may be changed, not by environment, but by contest between the host of inheritances.”Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children was thought to be outrageous doctrine, so long as it was taught only in Scripture. ”

“ The students of heredity are savages in this vital sense; that they stare back at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to schemes. In practice no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physical inheritance ”

“ But when the old man’s will was brought out to be read, the ungrateful son found that his father had remembered him along with all the other members of the family in the will, and had left him an inheritance with the others, who had not gone astray. ”

“ There is danger of over-emphasizing the doctrine of heredity and lessening the sense of personal responsibility for conduct. There is also danger of minimizing it, and consequently failing to give the help that many a life needs in its effort to overcome an evil inheritance. ”

“ The scientific study of heredity shows that the deterioration resulting from this cause is more sure and fatal than that following many forms of insanity. The son or daughter of a mean, dishonest man is handicapped with tendencies toward moral turpitude and anti-social conduct for which no amount of his ill-gotten gains, received by inheritance, can be an adequate compensation. ”

“ I would call attention at once to the special phenomenon which explains the problem of her destiny: I mean by this her heredity, or rather the radical and violent contrast of her maternal and paternal heredity. ”

“ But even then I hoped that it might prove merely a childish whim and fade away into other interests as the years progressed. It did not, as you very well know. I now feel it to be a family inheritance, impossible to overcome. I have resigned myself to it, only praying that in time other matters more important may overgrow and stifle the tendency. ”

“ Just as the inheritance and all possessions of a father are given to the son, as a rich compensation and reward for his obedience, and yet the son receives the inheritance, not on account of his merit, but because the father, for the reason that he is his father, wants him to have it. Therefore it is a sufficient reason why eternal life is called a reward, because thereby the tribulations which we suffer, and the works of love which we do, are compensated, although we have not deserved it. ”

“ The law of heredity sweeps down from the past and brings a terrible legacy to many who spend all their days in trying to escape from what has been forced upon them. What shall we say concerning those who are born in lust and must live in the midst of the vice of a great city, and who, in turn, give birth to a lustful and vicious brood? ”

“ One thing seems to me more than ever to be truly needful, not indeed the obtaining and the securing of inheritances below, but the getting prepared for my inheritance above—an inheritance to which every day and every hour spent for God is adding some increase of comfort, and which, when once possessed, will be found to be worth the possessing—an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and which fadeth not away. O my dear Mary, how does the grand enemy of our souls destroy by deluding! how does he infatuate the world at large! ”