Chapter 30

Obviously the word 'emotion' here means instinct as well,—the actions we call instinctive are expressions or manifestations of the emotions whose genesis Mr. Spencer describes. Now if habit could thus bear fruit outside the individual life, and if the modifications so painfully acquired by the parents' nervous systems could be found ready-made at birth in those of the young, it would be hardto overestimate the importance, both practical and theoretical, of such an extension of its sway. In principle, instincts would then be assimilated to 'secondarily-automatic' habits, and the origin of many of them out of tentative experiments made during ancestral lives, perfected by repetition, addition, and association through successive generations, would be a comparatively simple thing to understand.

Contemporary students of instinct have accordingly been alert to discover all the facts which would seem to establish the possibility of such an explanation. The list is not very long, considering what a burden of conclusions it has to bear. Let acquisitiveness and fear of man, as just argued for by Spencer, lead it off. Other cases of the latter sort are the increased shyness of the woodcock noticed to have occurred within sixty years' observation by Mr. T. A. Knight, and the greater shyness everywhere shown by large than by small birds, to which Darwin has called attention. Then we may add—

The propensities of 'pointing,' 'retrieving,' etc., in sporting dogs, which seem partly, at any rate, to be due to training, but which in well-bred stock are all but innate. It is in these breeds considered bad for a litter of young if its sire or dam have not been trained in the field.

Docility of domestic breeds of horses and cattle.

Tameness of young of tame rabbit—young wild rabbits being invincibly timid.

Young foxes are most wary in those places where they are most severely hunted.

Wild ducks, hatched out by tame ones, fly off. But if kept close for some generations, the young are said to become tame.[566]

Young savages at a certain age will revert to the woods.

English greyhounds taken to the high plateau of Mexico could not at first run well, on account of rarefied air. Their whelps entirely got over the difficulty.

Mr. Lewes somewhere[567]tells of a terrier pup whose parents had been taught to 'beg,' and who constantlythrew himself spontaneously into the begging attitude. Darwin tells of a French orphan-child, brought up out of France, yetshrugginglike his ancestors.[568]

Musical ability often increases from generation to generation in the families of musicians.

The hereditarily epileptic guinea-pigs of Brown-Séquard, whose parents had become epileptic through surgical operations on the spinal cord or sciatic nerve. The adults often lose some of their hind toes, and the young, in addition to being epileptic, are frequently born with the corresponding toes lacking. The offspring of guinea-pigs whose cervical sympathetic nerve has been cut on one side will have the ear larger, the eyeball smaller, etc., just like their parents after the operation. Puncture of the 'restiform body' of the medulla will, in the same animal, congest and enlarge one eye, and cause gangrene of one ear. In the young of such parents the same symptoms occur.

Physical refinement, delicate hands and feet, etc., appear in families well-bred and rich for several generations.

The 'nervous' temperament also develops in the descendants of sedentary brain-working people.

Inebriates produce offspring in various ways degenerate.

Nearsightedness is produced by indoor occupation for generations. It has been found in Europe much more frequent among schoolchildren in towns than among children of the same age in the country.

These latter cases are of the inheritance of structural rather than of functional peculiarities. But as structure gives rise to function it may be said that the principle is the same. Amongst other inheritances of adaptive[569]structural change may be mentioned:

The 'Yankee' type.

Scrofula, rickets, and other diseases of bad conditions of life.

The udders and permanent milk of the domestic breeds of cow.

The 'fancy' rabbit's ears, drooping through lack of need to erect them. Dog's, ass's, etc., in some breeds ditto.

The obsolete eyes of mole and various cave-dwelling animals.

The diminished size of the wing-bones of domesticated ducks, due to ancestral disuse of flight.[570]

These are about all the facts which, by one author or another, have been invoked as evidence in favor of the 'lapsed intelligence' theory of the origin of instincts.

Mr. Darwin's theory is that of the natural selection of accidentally produced tendencies to action.

"It would," says he, "be the most serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation, and then transmitted by inheritance in succeeding generations. It can clearly be shown that the most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not possibly have been thus acquired.[571]It will be universally admitted that instincts are as important as corporeal structure for the welfare of each species, under its present conditions of life. Under changed conditions of life, it is at least possible that slight modifications of instinct might be profitable to a species; and if it can be shown that instincts do vary ever so little, then I can see no difficulty in natural selection preserving and continually accumulating variations of instinct to any extent that may be profitable. It is thus, as I believe, that all the most complex and wonderful instincts have arisen.... I believe that the effects of habit are of quite subordinate importance to the effects of the natural selection of what may be called accidental variations of instincts;—that is, of variations produced by the same unknown causes which produce slight deviations of bodily structure."[572]

The evidence for Mr. Darwin's view is too complex to be given in this place. To my own mind it is quite convincing. If, with the Darwinian theory in mind, one re-reads the list of examples given in favor of the Lamarckian theory, one finds that many of the cases are irrelevant, and that some make for one side as well as for the other. This is so obvious in many of the cases that it is needless to point it out in detail. The shrugging child and the begging pup, e.g., prove somewhat too much. They are examples so unique as to suggest spontaneous variation rather than inherited habit. In other cases the observations much need corroboration, e.g., the effects of not training for a generation in sporting dogs and race-horses, the difference between young wild rabbits born in captivity and young tame ones, the cumulative effect of many generations of captivity on wild ducks, etc.

Similarly, the increased wariness of the large birds, of those on islands frequented by men, of the woodcock, of the foxes, may be due to the fact that the bolder families have been killed off, and left none but the naturally timid behind, or simply to the individual experience of older birds being imparted by example to the young so that a neweducational traditionhas occurred.—The cases of physical refinement, nervous temperament, Yankee type, etc., also need much more discriminating treatment than they have yet received from the Lamarckians. There is no real evidence that physical refinement and nervosity tend to accumulate from generation to generation in aristocratic or intellectual families; nor is there any that the change in that direction which Europeans transplanted to America undergo is not all completed in the first generation of children bred on our soil. To my mind, the facts all point that way. Similarly the better breathing of the greyhounds born in Mexico was surely due to a post-natal adaptation of the pups' thorax to the rarer air.

Distinct neuroticdegenerationmay undoubtedly accumulate from parent to child, and as the parent usually in this case grows worse by his own irregular habits of life, the temptation lies near to ascribe the child's deterioration to this cause. This, again, is a hasty conclusion. For neuroticdegeneration is unquestionably a disease whose original causes are unknown; and like other 'accidental variations' it is hereditary. But it ultimately ends in sterility; and it seems to me quite unfair to draw any conclusions from its natural history in favor of the transmission of acquired peculiarities. Nor does the degeneration of the children of alcoholics prove anything in favor of their having inherited the shattered nervous system which the alcohol has induced in their parents: because the poison usually has a chance to directly affect their own bodies before birth, by acting on the germinal matter from which they are formed whilst it is still nourished by the alcoholized blood of the parent. In many cases, moreover, the parental alcoholics are themselves degenerates neurotically, and the drink-habit is only a symptom of their disease, which in some form or other they also propagate to their children.

There remain the inherited mutilations of the guinea-pig. But these are such startling exceptions to the ordinary rule with animals that they should hardly be used as examples of a typical process. The docility of domestic cattle is certainly in part due to man's selection, etc., etc. In a word, the proofs form rather a beggarly array.

Add to this that the writers who have tried to carry out the theory of transmitted habit with any detail are always obligedsomewhereto admit inexplicable variation. Thus Spencer allows that

"Sociality can begin only where, through some slight variation, there is less tendency than usual for the individuals to disperse.... That slight variations of mental nature, sufficient to initiate this process, may be fairly assumed, all our domestic animals show us: differences in their characters and likings are conspicuous. Sociality having thus commenced, and survival of the fittest tending ever to maintain and increase it, it will be further strengthened by the inherited effects of habit."[573]Again, in writing of the pleasure of pity, Mr. Spencer says: "This feeling is not one that has arisen through the inherited effects of experiences, but belongs to a quite different group, traceable to the survival of the fittest simply—to the natural selection of incidental variations. In this group are included all the bodily appetites, together with those simpler instincts, sexual and parental, by which every race is maintained; and which must exist before the higher processes of mental evolution can commence."[574]

The inheritance of tricks of manner and trifling peculiarities, such as handwriting, certain odd gestures when pleased, peculiar movements during sleep, etc., have also been quoted in favor of the theory of transmission of acquired habits. Strangely enough; for of all things in the world these tricks seem most like idiosyncratic variations. They are usually defects or oddities which the education of the individual, the pressure of what is reallyacquiredby him, would counteract, but which are too native to be repressed, and breaks through all artificial barriers, in his children as well as in himself.

I leave my text practically just as it was written in 1885. I proceeded at that time to draw a tentative conclusion to the effect that the origin ofmostof our instincts must certainly be deemed fruits of the back-door method of genesis, and not of ancestral experience in the proper meaning of the term. Whether acquired ancestral habits played any part at all in their production was still an open question in which it would be as rash to affirm as to deny. Already before that time, however, Professor Weismann of Freiburg had begun a very serious attack upon the Lamarckian theory,[575]and his polemic has at last excited such a widespread interest among naturalists that the whilom almost unhesitatingly accepted theory seems almost on the point of being abandoned.

I will therefore add some of Weismann's criticisms of the supposed evidence to my own. In the first place, he has a captivating theory of descent of his own,[576]which makes him think ita prioriimpossible that any peculiarity acquired during lifetime by the parent should be transmitted to the germ. Into the nature of that theory this is not the place to go. Suffice to say that it has made him a keener critic of Lamarck's and Spencer's theory than he otherwise might have been. The only way in which the germinal products can be influenced whilst in the body of the parent is, accordingto Weismann, by good or bad nutrition. Through this they may degenerate in various ways or lose vitality altogether. They may also be infected through the blood by small-pox, syphilis, or other virulent diseases, and otherwise be poisoned. But peculiarities of neural structure and habit in the parentswhich the parents themselves were not born with, they can never acquire unless perhaps accidentally through some coincidental variation of their own.Accidentalvariations develop of course into idiosyncrasies which tend to pass to later generations in virtue of the well-known law which no one doubts.

Referring to the often-heard assertion that the increase of talent found in certain families from one generation to another is due to the transmitted effects ofexerciseof the faculty concerned (the Bachs, the Bernoullis, Mozart, etc.), he sensibly remarks, that the talent being kept in exercise, it ought to have gone on growing for an indefinite number of generations. As a matter of fact, it quickly reaches a maximum, and then we hear no more of it, which is what happens always when an idiosyncrasy is exposed to the effects of miscellaneous intermarriage.

The hereditary epilepsy and other degenerations of the operated guinea-pigs are explained by Professor Weismann as results ofinfectionof the young by the parent's blood. The latter he supposes to undergo a pathologic change in consequence of the original traumatic injury. The obsolescence of disused organs he explains very satisfactorily, without invoking any transmission of the direct effects of disuse, by his theory ofpanmixy, for which I must refer to his own writings. Finally, he criticises searchingly the stories we occasionally hear of inherited mutilations in animals (dogs' ears and tails, etc.), and cites a prolonged series of experiments of his own on mice, which he bred for many generations, cutting off both parental tails each time, without interfering in the least with the length of tail with which the young continued to be born.

The strongest argument, after all, in favor of the Lamarckian theory remains thea priorione urged by Spencer in his little work (much the solidest thing, by the way, which he has ever written) 'The Factors of Organic Evolution.'Since, says Mr. Spencer, the accidental variations of all parts of the body are independent of each other, if the entire organization of animals were due to such accidental variations alone, the amount of mutual adaptation and harmony that we now find there could hardly possibly have come about in any finite time. We must rather suppose that the divers varying partsbroughtthe other parts into harmony with themselves byexercising them ad hoc, and that the effects of the exercise remained and were passed on to the young. This forms, of course, a greatpresumptionagainst the all-sufficiency of the view of selection of accidental variations exclusively. But it must be admitted that in favor of the contrary view, that adaptive changes are inherited, we have as yet perhaps not one single unequivocal item of positive proof.

I must therefore end this chapter on the genesis of our mental structure by reaffirming my conviction that the so-called Experience-philosophy has failed to prove its point. No more if we take ancestral experiences into account than if we limit ourselves to those of the individual after birth, can we believe that the couplings of terms within the mind are simple copies of corresponding couplings impressed upon it by the environment. This indeed is true of a small part of our cognitions. But so far as logical and mathematical, ethical, æsthetical, and metaphysical propositions go, such an assertion is not only untrue but altogether unintelligible; for these propositions say nothing about the time- and space-order of things, and it is hard to understand how such shallow and vague accounts of them as Mill's and Spencer's could ever have been given by thinking men.

The causes of our mental structure are doubtless natural, and connected, like all our other peculiarities, with those of our nervous structure. Our interests, our tendencies of attention, our motor impulses, the æsthetic, moral, and theoretic combinations we delight in, the extent of our power of apprehending schemes of relation, just like the elementary relations themselves, time, space, difference and similarity, and the elementary kinds of feeling, have allgrown up in ways of which at present we can give no account. Even in the clearest parts of Psychology our insight is insignificant enough. And the more sincerely one seeks to trace the actual course ofpsychogenesis, the steps by which as a race we may have come by the peculiar mental attributes which we possess, the more clearly one perceives "the slowly gathering twilight close in utter night."

[526]'Accidental' in the Darwinian sense, as belonging to a cycle of causation inaccessible to the present order of research.

[527]The passage is in § 207 of the Principles of Psychology, at the end of the chapter entitled 'Reason.' I italicize certain words in order to show that the essence of this explanation is to demandnumerically frequentexperiences. The bearing of this remark will later appear. (Cf.pp. 641-2,infra.)

[528]Principles of Biology, part iii. chaps. xi, xii.—Goltz and Loeb have found that dogs become mild in character when their occipital, and fierce when their frontal, brain-lobes are cut off. "A dog which originally was cross in an extreme degree, never suffering himself to be touched, and even refusing, after two days' fasting, to take a piece of bread from my hand, became, after a bilateral operation on the occipital lobes, perfectly trustful and harmless. He underwent five operations on these parts.... Each one of them made him more good-natured; so that at last (just as Goltz observed of his dogs) he would let other dogs take away the very bones which he was gnawing" (Loeb, Pflüger's Archiv, xxxix. 300). A course of kind treatment and training might have had a similar effect. But how absurd to call two such different causes by the same name, and to say both times that the beast's 'experience of outer relations' is what educates him to good-nature. This, however, is virtually what all writers do who ignore the distinction between the 'front-door' and the back-door' manners of producing mental change.One of the most striking of these back-door affections issusceptibility to the charm of drunkenness. This (taking drunkenness in the broadest sense, as teetotalers use the word) is one of the deepest functions of human nature. Half of both the poetry and the tragedy of human life would vanish if alcohol were taken away. As it is, the thirst for it is such that in the United States the cash-value of its sales amounts to that of the sales of meat and of bread put together. And yet what ancestral 'outer relation' is responsible for this peculiar reaction of ours? The only 'outer relation' could be the alcohol itself, which, comparatively speaking, came into the environment but yesterday, and which, so far from creating, is tending to eradicate, the love of itself from our mental structure, by letting only those families of men survive in whom it is not strong. The love of drunkenness is a purely accidental susceptibility of a brain, evolved for entirely different uses, and its causes are to be sought in the molecular realm, rather than in any possible order of 'outer relations.'

One of the most striking of these back-door affections issusceptibility to the charm of drunkenness. This (taking drunkenness in the broadest sense, as teetotalers use the word) is one of the deepest functions of human nature. Half of both the poetry and the tragedy of human life would vanish if alcohol were taken away. As it is, the thirst for it is such that in the United States the cash-value of its sales amounts to that of the sales of meat and of bread put together. And yet what ancestral 'outer relation' is responsible for this peculiar reaction of ours? The only 'outer relation' could be the alcohol itself, which, comparatively speaking, came into the environment but yesterday, and which, so far from creating, is tending to eradicate, the love of itself from our mental structure, by letting only those families of men survive in whom it is not strong. The love of drunkenness is a purely accidental susceptibility of a brain, evolved for entirely different uses, and its causes are to be sought in the molecular realm, rather than in any possible order of 'outer relations.'

[529]Mr. Grant Allen, in a brilliant article entitled Idiosyncrasy (Mind, viii. 498), seeks to show that accidental morphological changes in the brain cannot possibly be imagined to result in any mental change of a sort which wouldfit the animal to its environment. If spontaneous variation ever works on the brain, its product, says Mr. Allen, ought to be an idiot or a raving madman, not a minister and interpreter of Nature. Only the environment can change us in the direction of accommodationto itself. But I think we ought to know a little better just what the molecular changes in the brain are on which thought depends, before we talk so confidently about what the effect can be of their possible variations. Mr. Allen, it should be said, has made a laudable effort to conceive them distinctly. To me his conception remains too purely anatomical. Meanwhile this essay and another by the same author in the Atlantic Monthly are probably as serious attempts as any that have been made towards applying the Spencerian theory in a radical way to the facts of human history.

[530]In my own previous chapters on habit, memory, association, and perception, justice has been done to all these facts.

[531]"The order of nature, as perceived at a first glance, presents at every instant a chaos followed by another chaos. We must decompose each chaos into single facts. We must learn to see in the chaotic antecedent a multitude of distinct antecedents, in the chaotic consequent a multitude of distinct consequents. This, supposing it done, will not of itself tell us on which of the antecedents each consequent is invariably attendant. To determine that point, we must endeavor to effect a separation of the facts from one another, not in our minds only, but in nature. The mental analysis, however, must take place first. And every one knows that in the mode of performing it, one intellect differs immensely from another." (J. S. Mill, Logic, bk. iii. chap. vii. § 1.)

[532]I quote from an address entitled 'Reflex Action and Theism,' published in the 'Unitarian Review' for November 1881, and translated in the Critique Philosophique for January and February 1882. "The conceiving or theorizing faculty works exclusively for the sake of ends that do not exist at all in the world of the impressions received by way of our senses, but are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity. It is a transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different world, the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected in the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose whatsoever. Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective purposes, preferences, fondness for certain effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we have the elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be effected, there is no escape. The world's contents aregivento each of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is like. We have to break that order altogether, and by picking out from it the items that concern us, and connecting them with others far away, which we say 'belong' with them, we are able to make out definite threads of sequence and tendency, to foresee particular liabilities and get ready for them, to enjoy simplicity and harmony in the place of what was chaos. Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this moment and impartially added together an utter chaos? The strains of my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of the wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Is it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few others—the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering—should evoke from places in your memory, that have nothing to do with this scene, associates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train of thought?—rational because it leads to a conclusion we have some organ to appreciate. We have no organ or faculty to appreciate the simply given order. The real world as it is given at this moment is the sum total of all its beings and events now. But can we think of such a sum? Can we realize for an instant what a cross-section of all existence at a definite point of time would be? While I talk and the flies buzz, a sea gull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France. What does that mean? Does the contemporaneity of these events with each other and with a million more as disjointed as they form a rational bond between them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world? Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is therealorder of the world. It is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as possible. As I said, we break it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break it into sciences; and then we begin to feel at home. We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it. On any one of these, we may react as if the rest did not exist. We discover among its parts relations that were never given to sense at all,—mathematical relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions,—and out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but onlyfor our purpose, the other relations being just as real and present as they; and our purpose is toconceive simplyandto foresee. Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends, pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling. It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to many of our æsthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends." Cf. also Hodgson: Philos. of Refl., ch. v; Lotze: Logik, §§ 342-351; Sigwart: Logik, §§ 60-63, 105.

[533]In an article entitled 'Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment,' published in the Atlantic Monthly for October 1880, the reader will find some ampler illustrations of these remarks. I have there tried to show that both mental and social evolution are to be conceived after the Darwinian fashion, and that the function of the environment properly so called is much more that ofselectingforms, produced by invisible forces, thanproducingof such forms,—producing being the only function thought of by the pre-Darwinian evolutionists, and the only one on which stress is laid by such contemporary ones as Mr. Spencer and Mr. Allen.

[534]"It is perfectly true that our world of experience begins with such associations as lead us to expect that what has happened to us will happen again. These associations lead the babe to look for milk from its nurse and not from its father, the child to believe that the apple he sees will taste good; and whilst they make him wish for it, they make him fear the bottle which contains his bitter medicine. But whereas a part of these associations grows confirmed by frequent repetition, another part is destroyed by contradictory experiences; and the world becomes divided for us into two provinces, one in which we are at home and anticipate with confidence always the same sequences; another filled with alternating, variable, accidental occurrences...."Accident is, in a wide sphere, such an every-day matter that we need not be surprised if it sometimes invades the territory where order is the rule. And one personification or another of the capricious power of chance easily helps us over the difficulties which further reflection might find in the exceptions. Yes, indeed, Exception has a peculiar fascination; it is a subject of astonishment, a θαῦμα, and the credulity with which in this first stage of pure association we adopt our supposed rules is matched by the equal credulity with which we adopt the miracles that interfere with them."The whole history of popular beliefs about nature refutes the notion that the thought of an universal physical order can possibly have arisen through the purely passive reception and association of particular perceptions. Indubitable as it is that all men infer from known cases to unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation. From the point of view of strict empiricism nothing exists but the sum of particular perceptions with their coincidences on the one hand, their contradictions on the other."That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is not discovered till the order is looked for. The first impulse to look for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained, we must know trustworthy means which infallibly possess a property or produce a result. But the practical need is only the first occasion for our reflection on the conditions of a true knowledge; even were there no such need, motives would still be present to carry us beyond the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest, or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those natural processes in which like is joined to like, and those in which like and unlike are joined; the former processes harmonize with the conditions of his thinking, the latter do not; in the former his concepts, judgments, inferences apply to realities, in the latter they have no such application. And thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and guiding principle of his own thought." (C. Sigwart: Logik, ii. 380-2.)

"Accident is, in a wide sphere, such an every-day matter that we need not be surprised if it sometimes invades the territory where order is the rule. And one personification or another of the capricious power of chance easily helps us over the difficulties which further reflection might find in the exceptions. Yes, indeed, Exception has a peculiar fascination; it is a subject of astonishment, a θαῦμα, and the credulity with which in this first stage of pure association we adopt our supposed rules is matched by the equal credulity with which we adopt the miracles that interfere with them.

"The whole history of popular beliefs about nature refutes the notion that the thought of an universal physical order can possibly have arisen through the purely passive reception and association of particular perceptions. Indubitable as it is that all men infer from known cases to unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation. From the point of view of strict empiricism nothing exists but the sum of particular perceptions with their coincidences on the one hand, their contradictions on the other.

"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is not discovered till the order is looked for. The first impulse to look for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained, we must know trustworthy means which infallibly possess a property or produce a result. But the practical need is only the first occasion for our reflection on the conditions of a true knowledge; even were there no such need, motives would still be present to carry us beyond the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest, or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those natural processes in which like is joined to like, and those in which like and unlike are joined; the former processes harmonize with the conditions of his thinking, the latter do not; in the former his concepts, judgments, inferences apply to realities, in the latter they have no such application. And thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and guiding principle of his own thought." (C. Sigwart: Logik, ii. 380-2.)

[535]Cf. Hodgson: Philosophy of Reflection, book ii, chap. v.

[536]The aspiration to be 'scientific' is such an idol of the tribe to the present generation, is so sucked in with his mother's milk by every one of us, that we find it hard to conceive of a creature who should not feel it, and harder still to treat it freely as the altogether peculiar and one-sided subjective interest which it is. But as a matter of fact, few even of the cultivated members of the race have shared it; it was invented but a generation or two ago. In the middle ages it meant only impious magic; and the way in which it even now strikes orientals is charmingly shown in the letter of a Turkish cadi to an English traveller asking him for statistical information, which Sir A. Bayard prints at the end of his 'Nineveh and Babylon.' The document is too full of edification not to be given in full. It runs thus:"My Illustrious Friend, and Joy of my Liver!"The thing you ask of me is both difficult and useless. Although I have passed all my days in this place, I have neither counted the houses nor inquired into the number of the inhabitants; and as to what one person loads on his mules and the other stows away in the bottom of his ship, that is no business of mine. But, above all, as to the previous history of this city, God only knows the amount of dirt and confusion that the infidels may have eaten before the coming of the sword of Islam. It were unprofitable for us to inquire into it."O my soul! O my lamb! seek not after the things which concern thee not. Thou camest unto us and we welcomed thee: go in peace."Of a truth thou hast spoken many words; and there is no harm done, or the speaker is one and the listener is another. After the fashion of thy people thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy and content in none. We (praise be to God) were born here, and never desire to quit it. Is it possible, then, that the idea of a general intercourse between mankind should make any impression on our understandings? God forbid!"Listen, O my son! There is no wisdom equal unto the belief in God! He created the world, and shall we liken ourselves unto Him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries of His creation? Shall we say, Behold this star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and cometh in so many years! Let it go! He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it."But thou wilt say unto me, Stand aside, O man, for I am more learned than thou art, and have seen more things. If thou thinkest that thou art in this respect better than I am, thou art welcome. I praise God that I seek not that which I require not. Thou art learned in the things I care not for; and as for that which thou hast seen, I spit upon it. Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou seek Paradise with thine eyes?"O my friend! if thou wilt be happy, say, There is no God but God! Do no evil, and thus wilt thou fear neither man nor death: for surely thine hour will come!"The meek in spirit (El Fakir)"Imaum Ali Zadi."

"My Illustrious Friend, and Joy of my Liver!

"The thing you ask of me is both difficult and useless. Although I have passed all my days in this place, I have neither counted the houses nor inquired into the number of the inhabitants; and as to what one person loads on his mules and the other stows away in the bottom of his ship, that is no business of mine. But, above all, as to the previous history of this city, God only knows the amount of dirt and confusion that the infidels may have eaten before the coming of the sword of Islam. It were unprofitable for us to inquire into it.

"O my soul! O my lamb! seek not after the things which concern thee not. Thou camest unto us and we welcomed thee: go in peace.

"Of a truth thou hast spoken many words; and there is no harm done, or the speaker is one and the listener is another. After the fashion of thy people thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy and content in none. We (praise be to God) were born here, and never desire to quit it. Is it possible, then, that the idea of a general intercourse between mankind should make any impression on our understandings? God forbid!

"Listen, O my son! There is no wisdom equal unto the belief in God! He created the world, and shall we liken ourselves unto Him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries of His creation? Shall we say, Behold this star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and cometh in so many years! Let it go! He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it.

"But thou wilt say unto me, Stand aside, O man, for I am more learned than thou art, and have seen more things. If thou thinkest that thou art in this respect better than I am, thou art welcome. I praise God that I seek not that which I require not. Thou art learned in the things I care not for; and as for that which thou hast seen, I spit upon it. Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou seek Paradise with thine eyes?

"O my friend! if thou wilt be happy, say, There is no God but God! Do no evil, and thus wilt thou fear neither man nor death: for surely thine hour will come!

"The meek in spirit (El Fakir)

"Imaum Ali Zadi."

[537]"Though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter taste which at another time would produce a sweet one, yet the idea of bitter in that man's mind would be as clear and distinct from the idea of sweet as if he had tasted only gall. Nor does it make any more confusion between the two ideas of sweet and bitter that the same sort of body produces at one time one and at another time another idea by the taste, than it makes a confusion in two ideas of white and sweet, or white and round, that the same piece of sugar produces them both in the mind at the same time." Locke's Essay, bk. ii. ch. xi. § 3.

[538]Cf. Bradley, Logic, p. 226.

[539]This apprehension of them as forming a single system is what Mr. Bradley means by the act ofconstructionwhich underlies all reasoning. The awareness, which then supervenes, of the additional relation of which I speak in the next paragraph of my text, is what this author calls the act ofinspection. Cf. Principles of Logic, bk. ii. pt. i. chap. iii.

[540]Realities fall under this only so far as they prove tobethe same. So far as they cannot be substituted for each other, for the purpose in hand, so far they are not the same; though for other purposes and in other respects they might be substituted, and then be treated as the same. Apart from purpose, of course, no realities ever are absolutely and exactly the same.

[541]A mind, in other words, which has gotbeyondthe merelydichotomicstyle of thought which Wundt alleges to be the essential form of human thinking (Physiol. Psych., ii. 312).

[542]Said to be expressed by Grassman in the fundamental Axiom of Arithmetic (a+b) + 1 =a+ (b+ 1).

[543]Compare Helmholtz's more technically expressed Essay Zählen u. Messen, in the Philosophische Aufsätze, Ed. Zeller gewidmet (Leipzig, 1887), p. 17.

[544]For the original statements, cf. J. S. Mill's Logic, bk. ii. chap. vi. §§ 2, 3; and bk. iii. chap. xxiv. § 5.

[545]The subdivision itself consumes none of the space. In all practical experience our subdivisions do consume space. They consume it in our geometrical figures. But for simplicity's sake, in geometry we postulate subdivisions which violate experience and consume none of it.

[546]Cf. A. de Morgan: Syllabus of a proposed System of Logic (1860), pp. 46-56.

[547]Cf. Locke's Essay, bk. ii. chap. xvii. § 6.

[548]Some readers may expect me to plunge into the old debate as to whether thea prioritruths are 'analytic' or 'synthetic.' It seems to me that the distinction is one of Kant's most unhappy legacies, for the reason that it is impossible to make it sharp. No one will say that such analytic judgments as "equidistant lines can nowhere meet" arepuretautologies. The predicate is a somewhat new way of conceiving as well as of naming the subject. There issomething'ampliative' in our greatest truisms, our state of mind is richer after than before we have uttered them. This being the case, the question "at what point does the new state of mind cease to beimplicitin the old?" is too vague to be answered. The only sharp way of defining synthetic propositions would be to say that they express a relation betweentwo dataat least. But it is hard to find any proposition which cannot be construed as doing this. Even verbal definitions do it. Such painstaking attempts as that latest one by Mr. D. G. Thompson to prove all necessary judgments to be analytic (System of Psychology, ii. pp. 232 ff.) seem accordingly butnugæ difficiles, and little better than wastes of ink and paper. All philosophic interest vanishes from the question, the moment one ceases to ascribe toany a prioritruths (whether analytic or synthetic) that "legislative character for all possible experience" which Kant believed in. We ourselves have denied such legislative character, and contended that it was for experience itself to prove whether its data can or cannot be assimilated to those ideal terms between whicha priorirelations obtain. The analytic-synthetic debate is thus for us devoid of all significance. On the whole, the best recent treatment of the question known to me is in one of A. Spir's works, his Denken und Wirklichkeit, I think, but I cannot now find the page.

[549]Book iv. chaps. ix. § 1; vii. 14.

[550]Chap. v. §§ 6, 8.

[551]Kant, by the way, made a strange tactical blunder in his way of showing that the forms of our necessary thought are underived from experience. He insisted on thought-forms with which experience largelyagrees, forgetting that the only forms which could not by any possibility be the results of experience would be such as experienceviolated. The first thing a Kantian ought to do is to discover forms of judgment to whichnoorder in 'things' runs parallel. These would indeed be features native to the mind. I owe this remark to Herr A. Spir, in whose 'Denken und Wirklichkeit' it is somewhere contained. I have myself already to some extent proceeded, and in the pages which follow shall proceed still farther, to show the originality of the mind's structure in this way.

[552]Yet even so late as Berkeley's time one could write: "As in reading other books a wise man will choose to fix his thoughts on the sense and apply it to use, rather than lay them out in grammatical remarks on the language: so in perusing the volume of nature methinks it is beneath the dignity of the mind to affect an exactness in reducing each particular phenomenon to general rules, or showing how it follows from them. We should propose to ourselves nobler views, namely, to recreate and exalt the mind with a prospect of the beauty, order, extent, and variety of natural things: hence, by proper inferences, to enlarge our notions of the grandeur, wisdom, and beneficence of the Creator," etc., etc., etc. (Principles of Human Knowledge, § 109.)

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