2 52 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



command of its gathered resources. Language, customs, 

 writing, literature, history, knowledge and empirical practice 

 are all storehouses of traditional information at the disposal 

 of the human individual who learns their use. Herediy with 

 the human individual comes more and more to mean, not (as 

 in the case of animals) the predisposition or capacity to act 

 or react in certain definite ways, but the general capacity of 

 experience, the capacity to learn or acquire in the individual 

 life the power to act in an indefinite number of ways. In the 

 human inheritance general educability takes the place of 

 definite specific hereditary functions. Whereas an animal 

 is born with the ability to perform a certain limited number 

 of functions, the human individual is born with the general 

 capacity of educability or being educated to learn an indefi- 

 nite number of functions in his lifetime. The animal is still 

 under the domination of his physical structure, and in his 

 action is limited to the functions inherited with this struc- 

 ture, with a very limited range of learning new actions. The 

 human individual, on the contrary, finds himself but little 

 restricted in his development by his hereditary structure, 

 and finds himself blest with an almost unlimited adaptability 

 and capacity for experience and knowledge. In other words, 

 the inheritance of Mind supersedes the organic inheritance 

 more and more. With an animal definite modes of function- 

 ing are inherited; with the human individual general mental 

 plasticity is chiefly inherited. And the definite specific modes 

 of functioning which an animal inherits with his physiologi- 

 cal structure, the human individual learns and acquires from 

 the social tradition into which he is born. Nothing shows 

 more clearly the revolution which the appearance of Mind 

 has wrought than this far-reaching transformation which it 

 has effected in the methods and procedure of organic Evo- 

 lution. On the animal plane structure still largely deter- 

 mines function, but on the human plane mental plasticity so 

 dominates everything else in the inheritance that the impor- 

 tance of structure is completely dwarfed, and it appears as 

 a subordinate factor in the total human situation. Even 

 so, however, it retains a great importance which often 



