- td8 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
- -in his work on Ethics, criticising Spencer’s theory of moral 
intuitions from a physiological point of view, is more dis- 
dainful. ‘‘ Actual neurology,’ he says, “‘ has about as much 
connection with these assumptions as actual astronomy and 
geology with Jules Verne’s voyages of discovery.” : 
My survey has been far from exhaustive, but I have at 
least considered some important cases in their bearing on 
the theory of use-inheritance. Psychology, it appears to 
me, lends no countenance to the theory. From the facts of 
human progress, we know that variations have come in from 
time to time. In accordance with the hypothesis of evolu- 
tion, we may believe that similar changes have occurred. 
along the whole line of mental life, and that, connected as 
they are with nervous modifications, they have been 
hereditarily transmitted. It is a legitimate task to inquire 
into the conditions of such psychical variations, and to 
reduce them to their elementary constituents. But the 
principles of heredity and of evolution do not necessarily 
imply the hereditary transmission of characters acquired by 
use or disuse in the lives of individuals; and the theory of 
use-inheritance, worked for all that it is worth, has been 
found to be misleading. 
