362 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



be reduced to rule and definitely expressed, yet the error is perennial 

 of regarding logic as reason, and calculations, necessarily imperfect 

 from the extent and complexity of the forces at work, as sound judg- 

 ment. 



The modern view that human intelligence is due to the experiences 

 of the race organized in the brain gives an explanation to a very inter- 

 esting group of facts. When the education of an individual is totally 

 unlike that received b}- his line of progenitors, it cannot take deep root 

 in his nature. Every conscientious Christian missionary laments the 

 difficulty of making a really deep impression on a pagan mind. The 

 momentum of ages cannot be changed in direction in a single- life, and, 

 if it could, the pledges of human jDrogress, which after all are based on 

 human permanence, would be done away. In the conflict between 

 inherited instincts and personally-acquired convictions, it is as if the 

 man were attempting to fight all his ancestry at once, and he is usually 

 worsted in the fray. Natural historians are familiar with the survival 

 in animals of habits once useful to them in the distant past, but in 

 their changed conditions no longer so. Some reptiles now living on 

 land possess the remnants of organs once used in their perfection by 

 their remote ancestry in aquatic life. In a somewhat parallel way, the 

 superstitions of our progenitors persist in many persons of undoubted 

 common-sense. Madame de Stael said, when asked if she believed in 

 ghosts, " No, but I am afraid of them." When we consider the great 

 problems of life and death in hours of calm reason, our reflections are 

 apt to take a direction very different from that along which our instinc- 

 tive feelings may impel us in seasons of pain and distress. It is a poor 

 apology for a crude theological belief that our instincts declare it to be 

 true, however much reason may contradict it. Instinct has no infalli- 

 bility : in the human mind it is simply the register of thoughts and 

 experiences during the long, primitive ages of our race ; and our own 

 opinions formed by personal accumulation since birth more probably 

 point toward truth, than the lines of feeling laid down in our fibres in 

 times of struggling intelligence and fierce strifes with natural powers, 

 awful and unknown. In the conflict between instinct and reason, it 

 would be strange indeed to contemn that reason which is only a better 

 instinct than we have now, in the making. The study of race-impulses 

 in an individual makes clear why it is that a man will do generous, 

 heroic deeds, from which it is impossible for him to derive advantage. 

 He acts as he does not from calculation, but from instinctive incite- 

 ments inherited from parentage of noble blood ; the line of race-bene- 

 fit may not always coincide with that of indi^'idual good, but the impe- 

 tus of ancestral forces transcends self-regard, and leaves the account of 

 debit and credit apparently unbalanced. Not only are human instincts 

 at times noble and heroic, but also, unfertunately more often, cruel 

 and destructive. When a war breaks out, or any great public dissen- 

 sion arises, how speedily can the thin plating of civilization be abraded 



