PROFESSOR TYNDALUS ADDRESS. 679 



the intellectual energy of after-years. Newton, when a hoy, was 

 weakly, and he showed no particular aptitude at school ; hut in his 

 eighteenth year he went to Cambridge, and soon afterward astonished 

 his teachers by his power of dealing with geometrical problems. Dur- 

 ing his quiet youth his brain was slowly preparing itself to be the or- 

 gan of those energies which he subsequently displayed. 



By myriad blows (to use a Lucretian phrase) the image and super- 

 scription of the external world are stamped as states of consciousness 

 upon the organism, the depth of the impression depending upon the 

 number of the blows. When two or more phenomena occur in the en- 

 vironment invariably together, they are stamped to the same depth 

 or to the same relief, and indissolubly connected. And here we come 

 to the threshold of a great question. Seeing that he could in no way 

 rid himself of the consciousness of Space and Time, Kant assumed 

 them to be necessary "forms of thought," the moulds and shapes into 

 which our intuitions are thrown, belonging to ourselves solely and 

 without objective existence. With unexpected power and success Mr. 

 Spencer brings the hereditary-experience theory, as he holds it, to bear 

 upon this question. " If there exist certain external relations which 

 are experienced by all organisms at all instants of their waking lives — 

 relations which are absolutely constant and universal — there will be 

 established answering internal relations that are absolutely constant 

 and universal. Such relations we have in those of Space and Time. 

 As the substratum of all other relations of the Non-Ego, they must be 

 responded to by conceptions that are the substrata of all other rela- 

 tions in the Ego. Being the constant and infinitely repeated elements 

 of thought, they must become the automatic elements of thought — the 

 elements of thought which it is impossible to get rid of — the * forms 

 of intuition.' " 



Throughout this application and extension of the " Law of Insep- 

 arable Association," Mr. Spencer stands on totally different ground 

 from Mr. John Stuart Mill, invoking the registered experiences of the 

 race instead of the experiences of the individual. His overthrow of 

 Mr. Mill's restriction of experience is, I think, complete. That restric- 

 tion ignores the power of organizing experience furnished at the out- 

 set to each individual ; it ignores the different degrees of this power 

 possessed by different races and by different individuals of the same 

 race. Were there not in the human brain a potency antecedent to all 

 experience, a dog or cat ought to be as capable of education as a man. 

 These predetermined internal relations are independent of the experi- 

 ences of the individual. The human brain is the " organized register 

 of infinitely numerous experiences received during the evolution of 

 life, or rather during the evolution of that series of organisms through 

 which the human organism has been reached. The effects of the most 

 uniform and frequent of these experiences have been successively be- 

 queathed, principal and interest, and have slowly mounted to that 



