AfAN THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE. 197 



of the doctrine which regards experience as the basis of all our 

 knowledge, it is maintained that the primary beliefs of each in 

 dividual are nothing else than generalizations which he forms of 

 such experiences as he has either himself acquired or has consci 

 ously learned from others; and they deny that there is any original 

 or intuitive tendency to the formation of such beliefs, beyond 

 that which consists in the power of retaining and generalizing 

 experiences. 



I have not introduced this subject with any idea of placing 

 before you even a summary of the ingenious arguments by which 

 these opposing doctrines have been respectively supported ; nor 

 should I have touched on the question at all, if I did not believe 

 that a means of reconcilement between them can be found in the 

 iden, that the intellectual intuitions of any one generation are the 

 embodied experiences of the prerious race. For, as it appears to me, 

 there has been a progressive improvement in the thinking power 

 of man ; every product of the culture which has preceded serving 

 to prepare the soil for yet more abundant harvests in the future. 



Now, as there can be no doubt of the hereditary transmission 

 in man of acquired constitutional peculiarities, which manifest 

 themselves alike in tendencies to bodily and to mental disease, so 

 it seems equally certain that acquired mental habitudes often im 

 press themselves on his organi/.ation, with sufficient force and 

 permanence to occasion their transmission to the offspring as 

 tendencies to similar modes of t/ionght. And thus, while all admit 

 that knowledge cannot thus descend from one generation to 

 another, an increased aptitude for the acquirement, either of know 

 ledge generally, or of some particular kind of it, may be thus in 

 herited. These tendencies and aptitudes will acquire additional 

 strength, expansion, and permanence, in each new generation, 

 from their habitual exercise upon the materials supplied by a con 

 tinually enlarged experience ; and thus the acquired habitudes 

 produced by the intellectual culture of ages, will become a 

 &quot;second nature&quot; to every one who inherits them.* 



* Tliis doctrine was first explicitly put forth by Mr. Herbert Spencer; in 

 whose philosophical ticatises it will be Imuxl most ably developed. I am glad 

 to lie able to append the following extract from a letter which Mr. John Mill, 

 the ^reat master of the experiential school, was good enough to write to nv 

 a lew months since, with reference to the attempt I had made to place 



