34-O Habit and Instinct. 



increment of human faculty in successive generations is 

 an established fact. As we shall presently see, there 

 are careful thinkers who are not prepared to admit it as a 

 fact at all. But if these be right in denying the fact, th 

 consideration of the Lamarckian answer is unnecessary 

 and we must seek another solution of the problem 

 This is that evolution has been transferred from 

 organism to his environment. There must be incremen 

 somewhere, otherwise evolution is impossible. In soci 

 evolution on this view, the increment is by storage i 

 the social environment to which each new generation 

 adapts itself, with no increased native power of adapta 

 tion. In the written record, in social traditions, in th 

 manifold inventions which make scientific and industrial 

 progress possible, in the products of art, and the recorded 

 examples of noble lives, we have an environment whi 

 is at the same time the product of mental evolution 

 and affords the condition of the development of each 

 individual mind to-day. No one is likely to questio 

 the fact that this environment is undergoing steady an 

 progressive evolution. It is not perhaps so obvious th 

 this transference of evolution from the individual to th 

 environment may leave the faculty of the race at 

 standstill, while the achievements of the race are pro 

 gressing by leaps and bounds. This is no new doctrine. 

 Buckle, in his "History of Civilization," wrote as follows : * 

 ''Whatever, therefore, the moral and intellectual progress 

 of men may be, it resolves itself not into the progress of 

 natural capacity, but into a progress, if I may say so, of 

 opportunity; that is, an improvement in the circumstances 

 under which that capacity after birth comes into play. 

 Here then is the gist of the whole matter. The progress 



* " History of Civilization," vol. i. (1858), p. 178. Quoted in Dr. Reid's 

 " Present Evolution of Man," p. 170. 





