PROGRESS 25 



of a wary Amoeba. In the same way we can justifi- 

 ably say that one dog is affectionate, another intelligent : 

 but to speak of an affectionate earthworm or an in- 

 telligent snail has no more proper significance than it 

 would be to say that a dog was intellectual or religious. 



Quickness of learning then became of importance ; 

 but so long as the faculty of generalizing is absent, 

 associative memory, although liberating organisms 

 from the prison of a fixed and inherited mental con- 

 stitution, still pins them down to the accidental and 

 the particular ; an organism can only learn to react 

 to those particular experiences which chance has 

 decreed that it should have had. 



The next and last really salient step in evolution 

 was a double one. Which of its two parts came first 

 is hard to say ; probably they acted reciprocally 

 throughout. This step was, on the one hand, the 

 attainment of the power of generalization — of reason, 

 concept-formation, or what you will — ^and on the 

 other the origin of tradition, which in its turn was 

 made possible by the acquisition of speech and of a 

 gregarious mode of life. By these means, the human 

 species and its evolving ancestors were gradually 

 enabled, first, to free experience ever more and more 

 from the accidental and to store what was essential ; 

 and, secondly, to bring gradually more and more of the 

 experience of the whole race to bear upon the present 

 problem, and to plan further and further ahead, and 

 on a larger and larger scale. 



