The Origin of Adaptive Movements 55 



of a movement tends to discharge motor energy into the 

 channels as near as may be to those necessary for that 

 movement.! Given these two elements of endowment in 

 the child, and he can learn anything that his father did, 

 without inheriting any particular acts learned by the parent. 

 And we must in any case give the child so much ; for the 

 principle of dynamogenesis is a fundamental law in all 

 organisms, and the tendency to learn by imitation, sugges- 

 tion, etc., is present, as a matter of fact, with greater or 

 less range, in man and in many other animals as well. 



The only apparent hindrance to the child's learning 

 everything that his life in society requires would be just 

 the thing that the advocates of Lamarckism argue for — the 

 inheritance of acquired characters. For such inheritance 

 would tend so to bind up the child's nervous substance in 

 fixed forms that he would have less or possibly no plastic 

 substance left to learn anything with. Such fixity occurs 

 in the animals in which instinct is largely developed ; 

 they have little power to learn anything new, just because 

 their nervous systems are not in the mobile condition rep- 

 resented by high consciousness. They have instinct and 

 little else. Now, I think the Darwinian can account for 

 instinct also, but that is beside the point ; the point to be 

 made now is that, if Lamarckism were true, we should all 

 be, to the extent to which both parents perform the same 

 acts (as, for example, speech) in the condition of the crea- 

 tures who do only certain things and do them by instinct. 

 It may well be asked of the Lamarckian : What is it that 

 is peculiar about the strain of heredity of certain creatures 

 that they should be so remarkably endowed with instincts t 



1 Both of these requirements are worked out in detail in Mental Develop- 

 ment. 



