230 Evolution and Natural Realism. CHAP. 



of all the experience of all conscious organisms ; and 

 though experience is not consciously inherited, yet its 

 results are inherited and pass into character ; so that 

 when organisms in the course of their evolution 

 become in any degree intelligent, these conceptions 

 enter into their intelligence and become part of it. 

 It is surely a simple and natural view, that these are 

 forms of thought which have become so by unvary- 

 ing experience of them, continued through countless 

 generations ; rather than unreal modes in which 

 Consciousness, from its dawn among the first animals 

 that acquired the sense of sight, to its highest 

 development in the brain of man, has been so 

 falsified as to be compelled to understand things as 

 they are not, and to read realities unreally. The last 

 word of science Evolution thus tends to support 

 the belief that Consciousness, being evolved among 

 the facts of the universe, reflects them truly ; and to 

 confirm that Natural Eealism which is the spontaneous 

 belief not only of men, but, I doubt not, of beasts 

 below us and angels above. 



In adhering to Kant's Agnosticism, and denying 

 the external objective reality of these conceptions, 

 Herbert Spencer, and those who think with him, 

 appear inconsistent with their own principles. Being 

 unable to get beyond the truth that Time, Space, and 

 Causation are, in fact, forms of thought, and regard- 

 ing the mind as something distinct from the world of 

 matter and altogether unlike it, Kant was consistent 

 with himself in denying that these are realities of 



