232 THE PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY 



The strange inhabitant of the prison would be a mere bag of 

 bones. A feeble heart would beat between feeble lungs. 

 Big teeth would overcrowd its baby jaws, and long hair from 

 its head would cover its body as with a garment. Its mind, 

 like that of a new-born baby, would be almost a perfect 

 blank. Light and sound and its other sensations would 

 convey no meanings to it. Moreover, unlike the baby, at 

 its age it would have lost, in great measure, the power of 

 making acquirements, physical and mental. It could, there- 

 fore, no longer grow as a result of use and exercise. It 

 would remain helpless, inert, crippled, a hopeless imbecile. 



392. The frog's body, then, gains almost nothing from use 

 and his mind almost nothing from experience. They develop 

 much as man's sexual organs and instincts develop. On the 

 other hand man depends, as regards body and mind, very 

 largely on use and experience. The frog's notion of the 

 surrounding world is inborn and instinctive, and descends 

 by actual inheritance from parent to offspring. But the 

 individual frog is unable to add materially to that knowledge. 

 In other words, the frog, as we have the strongest reasons to 

 believe, has little memory. As a consequence he has little 

 idea of the past and therefore of the future. He lives almost 

 wholly in the present. 1 His actions, therefore, are not due 



1 That is, he lives almost wholly in what has been called the " specious 

 present." The real present is an instant, a knife-edge of time; "the 

 practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but with a certain breadth 

 of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two 

 directions into time. The unit of composition of time is a duration, 

 with a bow and a stern as it were a rearward- and a forward-looking 

 end. . . . The specious present has, in addition, a vaguely vanishing 

 backward and forward fringe ; but its nucleus is probably the dozen 

 seconds or less that have just elapsed.' 3 (James, Principles of Psychology, 

 vol. i., pp. 609 and 613.) " All the notes of a bar of a song seem to 

 the listener to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of 

 a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. At the 

 instant of the termination of such series no part of the time measured 

 by them seems to be a past. Time, then, considered relatively to 

 human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz. the obvious past, the 

 specious present, the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious 

 present it consists of three . . . nonentities the past, which does not 

 exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the 

 present ; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of 

 the specious present." (G. R. Clay, The Alternative, p. 167. Quoted by 

 James.) 



In human beings the specious present is of short duration. It may 

 be shorter or much longer in various lower animals. An Egyptian fly 

 is back on one's face the moment it has dodged the hand. Apparently 

 the deadly peril has already passed from its mind. A wasp is a stupid 

 animal, though, as Lord Avebury has shown, somewhat capable of 



