322 PROBLEMS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 



the various facts of observation into harmony with one another. 

 Newton found that the resistance of air to a body in motion 

 increased as the square of the velocity. In this fact we have 

 learnt to find the secret of a bird's flight. Advancing a step 

 further we can see that only by rapidity of motion can man 

 solve the problem of aerial navigation. The problem of evolu- 

 tion is now being attacked. Malthus observed that there was 

 a limited amount of food and that there was a struggle among 

 men to obtain a share. Darwin applied this to the whole field 

 of animated nature. He saw further that breeders modified 

 animal forms by selection. He looked out over the face of the 

 earth to see if there was anything that occupied the breeder's 

 place, selecting the better forms and developing new breeds, 

 and he saw that the struggle for existence might be held to 

 do the work of the breeder. An original man is, therefore, if 

 this view be correct, a man who has an exceptional power of 

 seeing the bearing of facts upon other facts, and when he dis- 

 covers a relation between ideas or between objects strictly, 

 there is no distinction to be made that has hitherto remained 

 unnoticed, he gets (or deserves) credit for originality. 1 



We may now return to the subject of education and the way 

 in which it multiplies congenital brain power. 



intellectual The training of a pupil's mind consists in putting models 

 machinery b e f ore it for imitation and encouraging him to make use of them 

 under varying circumstances and apply them in new fields. 

 Many of these models may be regarded as pieces of machinery 

 which enable the mind to do work which it would otherwise 

 find enormously difficult or impossible. Our system of counting, 

 Mr Benjamin Kidd has pointed out, is nothing but a mental tape 

 measure. We arrange the objects we are counting along a line 

 of mentally pictured figures, every tenth number being written 

 big in order to help the mind's eye. When we borrow 10 and 

 carry I we are equally making use of a piece of mechanism. 

 As we proceed in arithmetic, our progress is made possible by 

 the use of new machinery, into the mysteries of which we are 



1 On the process of learning see Professor Mark Baldwin's Mental Development in 

 the Child and the Race. 



