26 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I believe, are only lingering superstitions that will probably pass away 

 in another half century, and we shall hear nothing more of them ; the 

 fact being that the tendency to these delusions is being gradually 

 grown out of. 



Now, this is the point I would especially dwell upon. To the child- 

 mind nothing is too strange to be believed. The young child knows 

 nothing about the Laws of Xature ; it knows no difference between 

 what is conformable to principles, and what, on the other hand, is so 

 strange that an educated man cannot believe it. To the child every 

 new thing that it sees is equally strange; there is none of that power 

 of discrimination that we acquire in the course of our education the 

 education given to us, and the education that we give ourselves. We 

 gradually, in rising to adult years, grow out of this incapacity to dis- 

 tinguish what is strange from what is normal or ordinary. We grad- 

 ually come to feel " Well, I can readily believe that, because it fits 

 in with my general habit of thought ; I do not see any thing strange in 

 this, although it is a little unusual." But, on the other hand, there 

 are certain things we feel to be too strange and absurd to be believed ; 

 and that feeling we come to especially, when we have endeavored to 

 cultivate our Common-Sense in the manner which I described to you 

 in my last lecture. The higher our common-sense that is, the gen- 

 eral resultant of the whole character and discipline of our minds the 

 more valuable is the direct judgment that we form by the use of it. 

 And it is the growth of that common-sense, which is the most remark- 

 able feature in the progress of thought during the last century. The 

 discoveries of science ; the greater tendency to take rational and sober 

 views of religion ; the general habit of referring things to principles ; 

 and a number of influences which I cannot stop particularly to de- 

 scribe, have so operated on the public mind, that every generation is 

 raised, I believe, not merely by its own culture, but by the acquired 

 result of the experience of past ages ; for I believe that every gener- 

 ation is born, I will not say wiser, but with a greater tendency to wis- 

 dom. I feel perfectly satisfied of this, that the child of an educated 

 stock has a much greater power of acquiring knowledge than the child 

 of an uneducated stock ; that the child that is the descendant of a 

 race in which high moral ideas have been always kept before the mind, 

 has a much greater tendency to act uprightly than the child that has 

 grown up from a breed that has been living in the gutter for genera- 

 tions past. I do not say that these activities are born with us, but the 

 tendency to them that is, the aptitude of mind for the acquirement 

 of knowledge, the facility of learning, the disposition to act upon right 

 principles I believe is, to a very great degree, hereditary. Of course 

 we have lamentable examples to the contrary, but I am speaking of 

 the general average. I am old enough now to look back with some 

 capacity of observation for forty years, and I can see in the progress of 

 society a most marked evidence of the higher general intelligence, the 



