THOUGHTS ON HEREDITY AND THINGS
By Don Marquis
From “Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers,” 1916
Isn’t Heredity wonderful, though!
We’ve been going into it rather deeply–My little Group of Serious, you know.
And, really, when you get into it, it’s quite complicated. All about Homozygotes and Heterozygotes, you know.
The Homozygotes are–well, you might call them the aristocrats, you know; thoroughbreds.
And the Heterozygotes are the hybrids.
Only, of course, they don’t need to be goats at all.
Not but what they could be goats, you know, just as easily as horses or cows or human beings.
But whether goats or humans, don’t you think the great lesson of Heredity is that Blood will Tell?
Really the farther I go into Philosophy and Science and such things the more clearly I see what a fund of truth there is in the old simple proverbs!
People used to find out great truths by Instinct, you know; and now they use Research–vaccinate guinea pigs, you know, and all that sort of thing.
Instinct! Isn’t Instinct wonderful!
And Intuition, too!
You know, I have the most remarkable intuition at times! Have I ever told you that I’m frightfully psychic?
Mr. Finch, the poet–you know Fothergil Finch, don’t you?–he writes vers libre and poetry both–Mr. Finch said to me the other evening, “You are extremely psychic!”
“How did you know it?” I asked him.
“Ah!” he said, “how does one know these things?”
And how true that is, when you come to think it over! How does one know?
He has the great magnetic eyes! I could feel them drawing my thoughts from me as we talked.
“You have a Secret,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. And to myself I added, “Alas!”
“Your secret is,” he said, “that there is a difference between you and the other girls.”
It was positively uncanny! I’ve felt that for years! But no one else had ever suspected it before.
“Mr. Finch,” I said, “I must have told you that–or else it was just a wild guess. You couldn’t have gotten it psychically. How did you know it?”
“One knows these things,” he said–a trifle sadly, I thought. “They come to one–out of the Silences; one knows not how. It is better not to ask how! It is better not to question! It is better
to accept! Do you not feel it so?
Sometimes I think that Fothergil Finch is the only man who has ever understood me.
You see, I am Dual in my personality.
There is the real Ego, and there is the Alter Ego.
And, besides these, I have so many moods which do not come from either one of my Egos! They come from my Subliminal Consciousness!
Isn’t the Subliminal Consciousness wonderful; simply wonderful?
We’re going to take it up in a serious way some evening next week, and thresh it out thoroughly.
But I must run along. I have an engagement with my dressmaker at two o’clock. You know, I’ve really found one who can make my gowns interpret my inner spirit.
