IX MIND AS AN ORGAN OF WHOLES 255 



past. Remembered or unremembered, the past exerts its 

 full force on the present experience. 



The second contribution of the past comes from farther 

 back. It is the contribution of the hereditary structure as 

 modified by ancestral experience, which lies behind all indi- 

 vidual experience. And in many ways its contribution is 

 even more significant than that of past individual experience. 

 It gives us our fundamental bias, our points of view, our 

 temperament, our instinctive reactions and our particular 

 individual ways of looking at persons and things. There is 

 in each human individual a distinctive basis of Personality 

 composed of these elements which cannot be traced to indi- 

 vidual experience and which is given by his hereditary struc- 

 ture and ancestral past. In many ways it is the most im- 

 portant part of our personal make-up. It is not conscious 

 or critical or rational in its activity, but it constitutes the 

 permanent background of the Mind and the Personality 

 behind all individual experience and development. Experi- 

 ence, reasoning, criticism usually make no impression on it. 

 I like or dislike somebody instinctively and at first sight, 

 and nothing thereafter alters my attitude to him. There is 

 nothing analytical about it, and its action is purely massive. 

 Generally the result of this massive hereditary memory could 

 be best described as a "feel" or sensing, an intuitive reading 

 or subconscious judgment of a person or thing or situation, 

 which cannot be further analysed to any good purpose. 

 Great wisdom and judgment no less than prejudices and 

 passions usually have their source in that distant past and 

 rest on no analysable evidence in the individual experience. 

 It will thus be seen that this contribution of the hereditary 

 past is also decidedly of a holistic character. The import- 

 ance given to it by the recent development of Psycho- 

 analysis need only be mentioned here. 



What has been said so far will be generally admitted. 

 To me, however, there is something even more decidedly 

 holistic in the hereditary factor. To me the ordinary senses 

 do not exhaust the possibilities of sensuous intuition in the 

 human mind. These senses have been differentiated and 



