PROGRESS, BIOLOGICAL AND OTHER 25 



way we can justifiably say that one dog is affection- 

 ate, another intelligent: but to speak of an affec- 

 tionate earthworm or an intelligent snail has no 

 more proper significance than it would be to say that 

 a dog was intellectual or religious. 



Quickness of learning then became of importance; 

 but so long as the faculty of generalizing is absent, 

 associative memory, although liberating organisms 

 from the prison of a fixed and inherited mental con- 

 stitution, still pins them down to the accidental and 

 the particular; an organism can only learn to react 

 to those particular experiences which chance has de- 

 creed that it should have had. 



The next and last salient step in evolution was a 

 double one. Which of its two parts came first is 

 hard to say; probably they acted reciprocally 

 throughout. This step was, on the one hand, the 

 attainment of the power of generalization — of rea- 

 son, concept-formation, or what you will — and on 

 the other the origin of tradition, which in its turn 

 was made possible by the acquisition of speech and 

 of a gregarious mode of life. By these means, the 

 human species and its evolving ancestors were grad- 

 ually enabled, first, to free experience ever more 

 and more from the accidental and to store what was 

 essential; and, secondly, to bring gradually more and 

 more of the experience of the whole race to bear upon 

 the present problem, and to plan further and further 

 ahead, and on a larger and larger scale. 



This has meant, among other things, that for the 



