49 Animal Life and Intelligence. 



We are not all alike. Our mental systems are different. 

 One artist \vill introduce into his canvas effects which, to 

 the eye of another, will at once strike a jarring note of 

 incongruity. To some minds 'the institution of slavery 

 presents no incongruity. There are not wanting men for 

 whom the degrading moral and physical conditions under 

 which many of our poor are forced to live and work present 

 little or no incongruity. To the Russian, English fidelity 

 to the marriage vow is said to be as incongruous as, to an 

 English woman, is the harem of an Eastern potentate. 



In the higher phases of human conduct, then, the 

 activities are subject to the law of the ideas of which they 

 are the outcome the law of elimination through incongruity. 



I have said that natural selection has little or nothing 

 to do with these higher phases of conduct. But has not 

 human selection through preferential mating? I believe 

 that it has; and I trust that it will have a still greater 

 influence in the future. It is one of the noblest privileges 

 of woman, for with her mainly lies the choice, that she 

 may aid in raising humanity to a higher level. If once 

 the idea of marrying for anything but pure affection could 

 become utterly incongruous to woman's mental nature ; 

 and if once the idea of perpetuating any form of moral, 

 intellectual, or physical deformity could become equally in- 

 congruous ; the bettering of humanity, through the exclusion 

 of the deformed in body and mind from any share in its 

 continuance must inevitably follow. Here, again, ideas 

 would determine conduct. 



And what, we may now proceed to ask, is the physio- 

 logical or kinetic aspect of this metakinetic process ? The 

 answer to this question involves the conception of what I 

 would term "interneural evolution." Just as the environ- 

 ment of a conceptual idea is constituted by other conceptual 

 ideas, so is the environment of its neural concomitant con- 

 stituted by the other neural processes in the brain. Just 

 as no idea can get itself accepted if it be in incongruity 

 with the system of ideas among which it is introduced, so, 

 too, can no neural process become established if it be not 



