232 NATURE AND MAN. 



fabric of thought, the shape and dimensions of whose recesses 

 determine the admissibiUty of the beliefs that constitute its 

 furniture. 



The general plan of that fabric may be said to be determined 

 by our congenital constitution. Every being is, in the first in- 

 stance, what Nature made him ; and however much his capacities 

 and tendencies may be developed and modified by subsequent 

 influences, these cannot build up any superstructure that was not, 

 as it were, sketched out in the original design. The foundations 

 are laid, and the basement-storey reared, by the education and 

 training we receive ; and while we are in no degree responsible 

 for this in the first instance, we gradually come to be so more and 

 more, as we acquire that power of volitional selection, by which 

 we can regulate the action of our intellectual faculties, and de- 

 termine the choice of its objects — so far, at least, as this may be 

 left to ourselves. But it is during this period of our lives that we 

 are most powerfully, though unconsciously, influenced by that 

 aggregate of external influeuces which the ancient Greeks desig- 

 nated as the No'/xos — a term we sometimes translate as " custom " 

 and sometimes "law," and which may be considered as expressing 

 that custom which has the force of law, and which has become so 

 completely a " second nature " as to be less easily changed than 

 any written law. Of this No^aos the "caste" of India is doubtless 

 the most conspicuous example j but no observant mind can fail 

 to recognize the applicability to our own social condition of the 

 admirable account given by Mr. Grote of the Greek conception of 

 that " King of all" (to borrow the phrase cited by Herodotus from 

 Pindar), which "exercises plenary power, spiritual as well as 

 " temporal, over individual minds ; moulding the emotions as well 

 "as the intellect, according to the local type — determining the 

 "sentiments, the belief and the predisposition in regard to new 

 "matters tendered for belief, of every one — fashioning thought, 

 "speech, points of view, no less than action — and reigning 

 "under the appearance of habitual, self-suggested tendencies." 

 — {^Plato and the other Companio?is of Sokratcs, vol. i. p. 249.) 



The physiologist who believes that during the whole period of 

 growth, the brain is shaping itself according to the mode in which 



