Literary Notices. xvii 



"metaphysical psychogenesis" for the further and totally distinct question 

 of the relationship between the symbolic series as a whole and its external 

 occasion. It is with positive psychogenesis that I deal. 



Psychogenesis and Experience . VVe give in general the name of experi- 

 ence to the process by which the individual powers of the mind are un- 

 folded. To learn by experience is essentially a process of trial and error. 

 The child in response to certain external stimuli, or perhaps automatically, 

 puts forth its varying activities. Through the guidance of experience 

 some of these actions are enforced, some checked. This, be it noted, is a 

 matter of control Experience does not originate the activities , it guides 

 them into suitable channels, selecting those which give satisfaction in con- 

 sciousness and rejecting those which in consciousness are unpleasant and 

 distasteful. . . . Such are the rude teachings of experience in the 

 lower planes of mental symbolism. More subtle is the guidance in the 

 higher plane of intellectual, moral and aesthetic control. But it is the 

 same in principle. Conduct in these regions, however, is more idealised; 

 less under the sway of somewhat rough perceptual inferences; more under 

 the control of reason and conceptual thought. The experience is here 

 more distinctly and obviously subjective. The modest woman is not pure 

 in act through bitter experience of the results of an immoral life. She is 

 pure in conformity with an ideal which is part of her moral nature. Just 

 as the child avoids the fire because it hurts, so does the pure woman shrink 

 from the thought of an immoral act because it hurts. Just as it is part of 

 the child's perceptual nature that he should suffer from contact with certain 

 objects, so is it part of such a woman's moral nature that she should be 

 scorched and burnt by impure thoughts. Experience is self-knowledge. 

 Without experience there could be no conscious selection of those activi- 

 ties which give satisfaction in consciousness, no rejection of those which 

 in consciousness are unpleasant and distasteful. And psychogenesis in the 

 individual involves such a selection among the states of consciousness 

 which constitute the mental symbolism . . So far as organic evo- 



lution is concerned, and psychogenesis is from our point of view closely 

 associated with organic evolution, this use-inheritence is, if established, 

 admittedly only one factor. Another factor, regarded as dominent by 

 most biologists, is natural selection. 



Rsychogenesis and Natural Selection. I need not describe ths mode of 

 action of natural selection. It is based upon the law of increase, the law 

 of variation, and the struggle for existence : the law of increase, that many 



