Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. 93 



outside of consciousness. Life, with all its mental as well 

 as vital manifestations, consists with him in the adjustment 

 of internal or subjective relations to external or objective 

 relations. 



The psychological fact is that the forms are connate, 

 therefore a priori; the psychogenetical fact is that the 

 forms are products of ancestral experience, and therefore 

 a posteriori. Locke was right in claiming that all knowl- 

 edge is ultimately derived from experience, from intercourse 

 between organism and its medium. Kant was right in rec- 

 ognizing the fact that there are definite tendencies or pre- 

 dispositions in the individual at birth. Locke was wrong in 

 denying that there is any element in mind a priori to the 

 individual. Kant was wrong in ignoring the results in the 

 individual mind of ancestral experiences. 



Says Mr. John Fiske : " Though Kant was one of the 

 chief pioneers of the doctrine of evolution, having been 

 the first to propose and to elaborate in detail the theory of 

 the nebular origin of planetary systems, yet the conception 

 of a continuous development of life in all its modes, physi- 

 cal and psychical, was not sufScientlv advanced in Kant's 

 day to be adopted into philosophy, ifence, in his treatment 

 of mind, as regards both intelligence and emotion, Kant 

 took what may be called a statical view of the subject ; and 

 finding in the adult, civilized mind, upon the study of which 

 his systems of psychology and ethics were founded, a num- 

 ber of organized moral intuitions and an organized moral 

 sense, which urges men to seek the right and shun the wrong, 

 irrespective of utilitarian considerations of pleasure and pain, 

 he proceeded to deal with these moral intuitions and this 

 moral sense as if they were ultimate facts, incapable of be- 

 ing analyzed into simpler emotional elements. ... So long 

 as the subject is contemplated from a statical point of view, 

 so long as individual experience is studied without reference 

 to ancestral experience, the follower of Kant can always 

 hold his ground against the followers of Locke in ethics as 

 well as in psychology. When the Kantian asserts that the 

 intuitions of right and wrong, as well as the intuitions 

 of time and space, are independent of experience, he occu- 

 pies a position which is impregnable so long as the organi- 

 zation of experiences through successive generations is left 

 out of the discussion. . . . Admitting the truth of the 

 Kantian position that there exists in us a moral sense for 

 analyzing which our individual experience does not afford 



