INTELLECTUAL EVOLUTION 321 



that no successful tackling of a proposition is able to produce. 

 But however important it may be for the educator and his pupils 

 to distinguish between original work and mere learning, yet the 

 two things are not so far removed from one another as is 

 generally supposed. When a proposition is learnt and in- 

 telligently written out, there is imitation. When a problem 

 is worked out without help, there is an application of what has 

 been learnt to new circumstances : in this sense the work is 

 original. Thus originality, as a quality of the brain, would 

 seem to be the power of bringing together the ideas formed in 

 different brain centres. The original man sees how a fact in 

 one field of knowledge bears upon a fact in another. If Sir 

 Isaac Newton had kept such commonplace events as the falling 

 of apples in a compartment of his brain completely walled off 

 from that in which he kept his mathematics, he might never 

 have made what is generally considered the greatest of his 

 discoveries. This becomes clear when we think of men and 

 they are not so very uncommon in whom this power of com- 

 bination is almost entirely wanting. A fact in their brain is 

 barren. It does not ring up a number of other facts, jostle 

 among them, and at length find its proper place. On the 

 contrary, in a brain in which the various centres are always in 

 communication, each new idea has to justify itself. If it is 

 incongruous, it is ejected, as a man is blackballed for a club. 

 If not ejected for incongruity, it may, nevertheless, not over- 

 easily harmonise with the ideas already established there. Much 

 readjustment may be necessary and the old ideas may undergo 

 profound modification through contact with the new comer, just 

 as a society may be modified by the admission of a new member 

 of strong and pronounced character. And the outcome of this 

 crowded jostling life within the brain may be the emergence of 

 ideas that appear definitely new, or in other words, of original 

 thought. Such would seem to be the way in which thought 

 advances. Objection might be raised to this on the ground 

 that mere combination cannot possibly lead to an advance. But 

 to argue thus is to be the slave of metaphor. Law reigns 

 throughout the universe, and thought "advances" by bringing 



