76 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



Constitution are due we find at once that we might as well 

 ask to which of the primeval men were due the first germs of 

 the moral faculty. The separation of the legislative and 

 executive functions, subsequently carried out with such mani- 

 fold disastrous results in America, was the favourite project of 

 reform in England at the period of the revolution of 1688, and 

 only escaped being carried into effect owing to circumstances 

 that present the appearance of being accidental. We see only 

 the impulse towards freedom and self-government pervading 

 many generations of Englishmen, and the apparently chance 

 survival of expedients that fell in with the aim of this impulse. 



A phenomenon of the same sort is the growth of Gothic 

 architecture. "No one," as Emerson says, "can walk in a 

 road cut through the pine-woods without being struck with 

 the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in winter, 

 when the barrenness of all other trees show^s the low arch of 

 the Saxons. . . . ISlor can any lover of nature enter the 

 old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals without feeling 

 that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder." Yet, if 

 we turn to the history of architecture, we find apparently no 

 one architect who had the design consciously in view of 

 reproducing in stone the image of the forest. We can trace, 

 on the contrary, the various stages by which the basilica 

 became transformed into the cathedral, and can only interpret 

 the ideal that fully realised itself in the fourteenth century 

 as one that more or less unconsciously dominated the mind 

 of many generations. The collective continuous mind thus 

 seems to have in it something that cannot be accounted for 

 offhand as the mere sum of the conscious thoughts and wishes 

 of various individual minds. 



If we glance at a widely-different department of life from 

 the politics and art of man, other illustrations, perhaps even 

 more interesting and more marvellous, present themselves. 

 When Mr. Darwin writes of sexual selection there are plainly 

 two very distinct principles before his mind. One is the sur- 

 vival of the strongest or best-armed males in their struggle for 

 the possession of the females : this involves no presupposi- 

 tion essentially different from that involved in natural selec- 

 tion. The other, that to which the continuous increase in the 

 beauty of the bird-world is due, does involve a presupposition, 

 the full purport of which Mr. Darwdn himself does not appear 

 to have clearly idealised. He thinks it sufficient to assume 

 that the hens appreciate beautiful forms and colours to 

 account for the fact that the cocks of many species become 

 from generation to generation more and more beautiful. This 

 indefinite increase in some abstract characteristic called 

 "beauty," however, does not at all adequately represent the 

 facts in individual instances. The " more and more " that 



