58 The Place of Consciousness in EvohUion 



by experience, through memory and classification/ This, 

 too, is true, provided the term * classification ' has a mean- 

 ing that psychologists agree to. So the question is again : 

 Can the higher mental functions be evolved from the lower 

 without calling in use-inheritance? So it seems. Here 

 indeed it seems that the fact of social transmission is the 

 main and controlHng consideration. It is notorious how 

 meagre the evidence is that a son inherits or has the pecul- 

 iar mental traits of parents beyond those traits contained 

 in the parents' own heredity. Galton has shown how rare 

 a thing it is for artistic, literary, or other marked talent to 

 maintain its strength in later generations. Instead, we find 

 such endowments showing themselves in many individuals 

 at about the same time, in the same communities, and under 

 common social conditions. Groups of artists, musicians, 

 literary men, appear together — as it were, a social out- 

 burst. The presuppositions of genius — obscure as the sub- 

 ject is — seem to be great power of learning or absorbing, 

 marked gifts or proclivities of a personal kind which are 

 not present in the parents but fall under the head of vari- 

 ations ; and with these a social environment of high level 

 in the direction of these variations. The details of the 

 individual's development, inside of the general proclivity 

 which he has, are determined by his social environment, 

 not by his natural heredity. And no doubt the phylo- 

 genetic origin of the higher mental functions — thought, 

 self-consciousness, etc. — must have been similar.^ 



There is not any great amount of truth in the claim of 

 Spencer that intellectual progress in the race requires the 

 Lamarckian view. The level of culture in a community 



1 Detailed account of the social factors involved in the evolution of these 

 higher faculties is attempted in the two earlier volumes of this series. 



