o6 The Theory of Genetic Modes 



he knows nothing. The very orighi of the categories 

 which we use in science restricts their application, since 

 there may be other types of experience which are so far 

 untouched and which might be construed only under other 

 categories. 



This becomes more evident as we rise in the scale of 

 the sciences, because the relativities of apprehension are 

 ever increasing with mental advance. As I have endeav- 

 oured to show in another place, the evolution of the higher 

 faculties is by adaptation to a system of environmental 

 relationships. The relation of the individual to this sys- 

 tem is, as evolution proceeds, increasingly remote and 

 indirect. 



Memory arises as an adaptation to the distant in time, 

 and as a weapon of prophecy, to the distant in space.^ 

 Imagination and thinking ^ are modes of psychic process 

 which deal with generalized, abstract, not-fully-present 

 data ; and in so far as the data are not fully present in so 

 far the relativeness of the result is increased. The child 

 acts upon his sense of the general, and constantly finds 

 that it fails in reference to the particular. He is ever 

 readjusting himself with reference to conditions with which 

 he has already coped with more or less success, but with- 

 out finality. It would seem to be only the fixed, the strictly 

 organic functions, which minister to his progress by imme- 

 diate contacts with the brutely concrete and bruising things 

 of time and space, which really * hold ' fast and inflexible 

 for us. Other accommodations are, by their nature as 

 accommodations, parts always of a growing system, elements 

 of a genetic process, factors of a larger accommodation 



^ Cf. the volume Mental Development, Chap. X. 

 2 Ibid., Chaps. X., XI. 



