Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. Ill 



of differing densities, between gases wherein the molecular 

 motion is too rapid to admit of a structural arrangement, 

 and solids in which the amount of retained motion is too 

 small to admit of molecular rearrangement. Spencer ob- 

 serves : " A large amount of secondary redistribution is possi- 

 ble only where there is a great quantity of retained motion ; 

 and, on the other hand, these distributions can have promi- 

 nence only when the contained motion has become small, 

 opposing conditions that seem to negative any large amount 

 of secondary redistribution." It is in organic bodies " that 

 these apparently contradictory conditions are reconciled," 

 for their peculiarity consists in the concentration of matter 

 in a high degree with a far larger amount of molecular mo- 

 tion than is found in other bodies of the same degree of 

 concentration. 



10. All living forms have been evolved in accordance 

 with the above-mentioned laws. The most complex are the 

 product of modifications wrought on pre-existent animals. 

 The evolution of species goes on, not in ascending lineal 

 series, but by continual divergence and redivergence. Com- 

 plexity of life and intelligence is correlated with complexity 

 of structure. The highest form of intelligence, the human, 

 has been reached by modifications wrought through ages 

 upon pre-existing intelligences. 



11. The mental faculties of man, not less than his brain 

 and nervous system, are the product of innumerable modi- 

 fications in the evolution of the highest creatures from the 

 lowest. 



Experiences registered in the nervous system produce 

 structural changes and are accompanied by mental modifi- 

 cations. The aptitudes and intuitions of the human mind 

 are the product of accumulated human experiences, trans- 

 mitted and organized in the race. Even the " a priori forms 

 of thought " have been slowly acquired. Whatever in the 

 mind transcends the experience of the individual is never- 

 theless the product of ancestral experiences. 



I'-i. Xot only is it true that our highest conceptions of 

 morality have been evolved in accordance with these laws, 

 but even the moral sense has been formed by accumulated 

 and multiplied experiences, registered in the slowly evolving 

 organism and transmitted as intuition, as sensitive in some 

 persons to a moral wrong as the tactile sense is to the sting 

 of a bee. The ultimate basis of morality is the source of 

 all phenomena, " an inscrutable power," as John Fiske well 



