THE GROWTH OF THE WILL. 13 



clearly that a vast space of time is required to bring any acquisition 

 up to the point of being transmitted to a perceptible amount. So 

 that the time obstacle still recurs ; and Professor Spence's difficulty 

 of permutations and combinations recurs with it. Indeed, if his com- 

 putations were good as against my view of the will, it would be little 

 less crushing against the start of voluntary power in the race : we 

 should need to substitute, in order to the development of humanity, 

 for millions of years, millions of millions. It is evident, to me at least, 

 that there must be a shorter road, in both cases, than his calculations 

 would suppose. 



6. I am quite ready to grant that our voluntary acquisitions repose 

 upon certain established tendencies call them instinctive or hereditary 

 and that the Professor is perfectly correct in describing the mature 

 will as a mixture of organic maturation with proper acquisition. But 

 I should not quite concur in his mode of expressing the proportions of 

 the two. I think I could show that the brain of man, while it must 

 contain at birth many preestablished groupings or connections, is dis- 

 tinguished for its flexibility, adaptation, or educability ; and that, if we 

 were to sum up the contents of any of our leading acquisitions, say 

 speech, the primordial part the supposed capacity of articulation 

 which the Professor thinks would need millions of tentatives, is the 

 base for a superstructure of enormous extent, needing nothing to ac- 

 count for it but the power of retentiveness operating upon these few 

 articulate modes. Consider the power of speaking seven languages, 

 and how little of this can be by any possibility transmitted, and we 

 must admit that, somehow or other, a vast number of connections can 

 be established in the lifetime of an individual ; every reasonable allow- 

 ance being made for hereditary tendencies. 



7. In order to prove that we possess by hereditary transmission a 

 countless number of organized muscular arrangements, upon which our 

 acquisitions are based, Professor Spence adduces the instances of abnor- 

 mal exaltation of capacity, under trance, mesmerism, somnambulism, 

 and other extraordinary conditions. For my own part, I doubt whether 

 these phenomena have been sufficiently investigated to be turned to this 

 use. We may readily suppose that the hereditary tendencies may be 

 inflamed by mental excitement to the ancestral level ; in other words, 

 that I can be made to do, without the full measure of training, all that 

 my forefathers may have attained to. This is like the case of forgotten 

 memories revived in fever. But that I should bjr being mesmerized, or 

 by being thrown into a trance, perform feats that no one of my ances- 

 tors had ever been educated to perform as, for example, ballet-dancing 

 or rope-walking is not within the legitimate application of the law of 

 heredity. It would be like water rising above its source. I am not 

 disputing the phenomena themselves ; but I think they need some other 

 principles for their explanation, and, if quoted as proving the extent of 

 our hereditary organization, they have the defect of proving too much. 



