THE INBORN POTENTIALITY OF THE CHILD 313 



up without its hearing any spoken language, in order to see 

 what language it would speak. Hearing no language it spoke 

 no language. Again, in 1840 a wild man was found in the 

 forests in Germany ; he spoke no language, but when brought to 

 a town he learnt German. 



Let us imagine for the sake then of explaining the important 

 part played by this social heritage on the individual mind, what 

 would happen if man were suddenly deprived of this heritage, 

 which as Huxley says, has " placed him as upon a mountain 

 top, far above the level of his humble fellows and transported 

 his grosser nature by reflecting here and there a ray from the 

 infinite source of truth." Supposing another flood came, and 

 instead of Noah and his family having been preserved with the 

 animals, only two infants (male and female) survived by some 

 such agency as the mythical she-wolf that suckled Romulus and 

 Remus, the founders of ancient Rome : and let us imagine that 

 they grew up and became the progenitors of a new race. 

 Deprived of a social heritage, they would have had to start 

 building it up anew, but probably this would have taken 

 countless ages, for there is no proof that the innate potential 

 brain power of these two children of modern civilised man to 

 create a social heritage would be immeasurably superior or 

 even much superior to the reindeer men who lived in Europe 

 and left their handwork in caves ages ago. According to Ray 

 Lankester, these men had as largely developed brains as modern 

 men. The man who made those drawings of deer with his rude 

 instruments was a great artist, and the man who first discovered 

 how to forge metal into an instrument for the use of the hand 

 instead of a chipped flint was potentially as great a genius as 

 Galileo or Newton. 



The life of two such human beings without a social environ- 

 ment would at first depend almost entirely upon the fixed, 

 stable, and preorganised characters of the species and sex, 

 which would determine by an untaught aptitude the instinctive 

 actions and behaviour necessary for the preservation of the 

 individual and the species, with primitive emotional states of 

 feeling and their special characteristic manifestations. Hence 

 might be displayed fear and anger, joy and sorrow, wonder 

 and surprise, play and self-display, curiosity, taste, and disgust. 



In common with all human beings, including savages, our 

 imagined pair would exhibit not only the primitive emotions, 



