ABSTRACT
IN HIS sparkling essay on the Great Villiers Connection,1 Keynes revealed a sense of the importance of hereditary ability-of the great truth, to use Karl Pearson’s phrase, that ability runs in stocks-that fits but ill into the picture many people seem to harbor of his intellectual world. The obvious inference about his sociology is strengthened by the fact that in his biographical sketches he was apt to stress ancestral backgrounds with unusual care. He would therefore understand my regret at my inability, owing to lack of time, to probe into the past of the Keynes Connection. Let us hope that someone else will do this, and content ourselves with an admiring glance at the parents. He was born on the fifth of June 1883, the eldest son of Florence Ada Keynes, daughter of the Reverend John Brown, D.D., and of John Neville Keynes, Registrar
of the University of Cambridge-a mother of quite exceptional ability and charm, one-time mayor of Cambridge, and a father who is known to all of us as an eminent logician and author, among other things, of one of the best methodologies of economics ever written.2
