250 The Evolution Hypothesis. 



amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent 

 in the brain of the infant which the infant in after 

 life exercises, and perhaps strengthens or further 

 complicates and which, with minute additions, it 

 bequeaths to future generations. And thus it happens 

 that the European inherits from twenty to thirty 

 cubic inches more brain than the Papuan. Thus it 

 happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely 

 exist in some inferior races, become congenital in 

 superior ones. Thus it happens that out of savages 

 unable to count up to the number of their fingers and 

 speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs, 

 arise at length our Newtons and Shakespeares."* 



There is no mistaking the significance of this doc- 

 trine. It makes the evolution of the nervous organ- 

 ism the origin of those innate principles that lie at 

 the basis of experience, and regulate all reasoning. 

 Intuitions are organized ancestral experiences regis- 

 tered in the brain, and become " the fixed functions of 

 fixed structures." Truth is the accord of the " absolute 

 cohesions" among the fibres of the cerebral masses- 

 with constant connections among the phenomena of 

 the environment. Reason has no more to do with 

 these organized experiences than to read the record : 

 nor, indeed, is its part even so active as reading would 

 imply : the brain works out the result ; consciousness- 

 means no more than our being aware of it, sometimes 



* Psychology, Vol. I., 208. 



