Bourget's Cosmopolis is a picture of the influence of social race characteristics on natural heredity, with the reaction of natural heredity again upon the new social conditions.
A speech of a character of Balzac's is to the point, as illustrating a certain appreciation of these social considerations which we all to a degree entertain.

The Duchesse de Carigliano says to Madame de Sommervieux: "I know the world too well, my dear, to abandon myself to the discretion of a too superior man.

You should know that one may allow them to court one, but marry them--that is a mistake! Never--no, no.

It is like wanting to find pleasure in inspecting the machinery of the opera instead of sitting in a box to enjoy its brilliant illusions." To be sure, we do not generally deliberate in this wise when we fall in love; but that is not necessary, since our social environment sets the style by the kind of intangible deliberation which I have called judgment and fitness.

Suppose a large number of Northern advocates of social equality should migrate to the Southern United States, and, true to their theory, intermarry with the blacks.
Would it not then be true that a social theory had run athwart the course of physiological descent, leading to the production of a legitimate mulatto society?
A new race might spring from such a purely psychological or social initiation.
While not agreeing, therefore, with the theory which makes the genius independent of the social movement--least of all with the doctrine that physical heredity is uninfluenced by social conditions--the hero worshipper is right, nevertheless, in saying that we can not set the limitations of the genius on the side of variations toward high intellectual endowment.