34° 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, the 

 consideration of the Lamarckian answer is unnecessary, 

 and we must seek another solution of the problem. 

 This is that evolution has been transferred from the 

 organism to his environment. There must be increment 

 somewhere, otherwise evolution is impossible. In social 

 evolution on this view, the increment is by storage in 

 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 the 

 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 which 

 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 question 

 the fact that this environment is undergoing steady and 

 progressive evolution. It is not perhaps so obvious that 

 this transference of evolution from the individual to the 

 environment may leave the faculty of the race at a 

 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'a 

 " Present Evolution of Man," p. 170. 



