Vom Vater hab’ ich die Statur Des Lebens ernstes Führen, Vom Mütterchen die Frohnatur Die Lust zum Fabuliren, etc. The combination of talents frequently found in one individual, and the appearance of different remarkable talents in the various branches of one and the same family, indicate that talents are only special combinations of certain highly-developed mental dispositions which are found in every brain. Many painters have been admirable musicians, and we very frequently find both these talents developed to a slighter extent in a single individual. In the Feuerbach family we find a distinguished jurist, a remarkable philosopher, and a highly-talented artist; and among the Mendelssohns a philosopher as well as a musician. The sudden and yet widespread appearance of a particular talent in correspondence with the general intellectual excitement of a certain epoch points in the same direction. How many poets arose in Germany during the period of sentiment which marked the close of the last century, and how completely all poetic gifts seem to have disappeared during the Thirty Years’ War. How numerous were the philosophers that appeared in the epoch which succeeded Kant; while all philosophic talent seemed to have deserted the German nation during the sway of the antagonistic ‘exact science,’ with its contempt for speculation. Wherever academies are founded, there the Schwanthalers, Defreggers, and Lenbachs emerge from the masses which had shown no sign of artistic endowment through long periods of time[53]. At the present day there are many men of science who, had they lived at the time of Bürger, Uhland, or Schelling, would probably have been poets or philosophers. And the man of science also cannot dispense with that mental disposition directed in a certain course, which we call talent, although the specific part of it may not be so obvious: we may, indeed, go further, and maintain that the Physicist and the Chemist are characterized by a combination of mental dispositions which differ from those of the Botanist and the Zoologist. Nevertheless, a man is not born a physicist or a botanist, and in most cases chance alone determines whether his endowments are developed in either direction. Lessing has asked whether Raphael would have been a less distinguished artist had he been born without hands: we might also enquire whether he might not have been as great a musician as he was painter if, instead of living during the historical high-water mark of painting, he had lived, under favourable personal influences, at the time of highly-developed and widespread musical genius. A great artist is always a great man, and if he finds the outlet for his talent closed on one side, he forces his way through on the other.