EVOLIJTIOXARY SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN CnARACTER. 381 



Keturning to the primary elements of mind, we may examine 

 their divisions with reference to the question of growth. To be- 

 gin with the perceptions, there are great diversities in the acute- 

 ness of the general and special senses, and greater and less sus- 

 ceptibilities to physical pleasure and pain. In the important 

 representative faculty, memory, the differences between people 

 are great. As perception as well as thinking involves a certain 

 amount of structural change, it is evident that susceptibility or 

 impressibility of the senses, which is the first stage of memory, 

 signifies ready metamorphosis of tissue. Unimpressibility, which 

 impedes memory, is a consequence of resistance on the part of 

 tissue to the usual stimuli. Hence the effect of " sights, sounds, 

 and sensations " is greatest in childhood, and the memory is most 

 impressible, for at that time the nervous tissue is undergoing con- 

 stant change, and nutrition, being in excess of waste, constantly 

 presents new material to be organized. And I may here refer to 

 the general truth, that consciousness of all kinds is the especial 

 and distinguishing attribute of life as distinguished from death 

 or no life.* Whatever other phenomena we may be accustomed 

 to regard as "vital," are only distinguishable from inorganic 

 motion or force, because they primitively took their form under 

 the guidance of consciousness, and are hence, so to speak, its 

 children. With the perfect working of most of the mechanism of 

 the body, consciousness no longer concerns itself, although it may 

 speedily do so in pathological conditions. This prerogative is 

 now restricted to the nervous system, and to certain parts of it ; 

 the one which is, histologically speaking, the most generalized of 

 the systems. And it is quite consistent with the *' doctrine of 

 the unspecialized," that nervous tissue in. its unfinished state in 

 childhood should be more impressible to stimuli than at later 

 periods of life. But this statement requires this modification, 

 that there is a stage of imperfection of mechanism which does not 

 display high sensibility, as, for instance, in the earliest infancy. 

 With age sensibility gradually diminishes. 



Next in order of appearance in growth are the emotions. It 

 is true that some of these are not fully developed until long after 

 the appearance of many or all of the intellectual faculties ; but it 

 is also true that their full development precedes that of the intel- 

 lect, in so far as they arc developed at all. The primitive condi- 



* "The Origin of the Will," "Penn Monthly," 1877, p. 440. 



