Heredity of the Intellect. 69 



facts and their laws there can be no disagreement between us 

 and the idealists. The difference between us springs, not from 

 any diametrical opposition of doctrine, but from the fact that to 

 the study of phenomena which both sides pursue, and to which 

 we strictly confine ourselves, the idealist joins a metaphysical c 

 theory, which, in our eyes, has no scientific value, since it 

 transcends science. 



It is true that idealists hold that the laws of nature, and, gener- 

 ally, of internal or external experience, have only a relative 

 phenomenal value ; but we have never asserted that experience 

 can give us the absolute. If the idealist admits, as he does, that 

 in the order of physical, chemical, physiological, and psychological 

 facts there are coexistences and sequences that can be reduced to 

 fixed formulas, he has no fair grounds for refusing to concede to 

 heredity a place among these empiric laws, though he may deny 

 that it applies to the intellect considered as noumenon. 



Thus the heredity of intellectual faculties can be reconciled 

 with the most transcendental idealism. If, now, we examine the 

 question in our own way, that is, without transcending experience, 

 we say that intellect, in its inmost nature, appears to us as one of 

 the manifestations of the unknowable. We may, indeed, as 

 psychology and the sciences advance, determine its empiric laws 

 and conditions more precisely ; but we shall not arrive at its essen- 

 tial nature. It is indisputable that within the last thirty years 

 English and German psychologists and particularly Herbert 

 Spencer, Bain, and Wundt have, with a precision previously 

 unknown, analyzed the modes of intellect and the conditions of its 

 development. They have shown that all intellectual processes, 

 from the highest and most complex down to the most elementary, 

 consist in apprehending resemblances and differences. To assimi- 

 late and dissimilate, to integrate and disintegrate, to combine 

 and differentiate such is the fundamental process of the intellect, 

 and it is found in all its operations, as well in the simplest as in 

 the most complex. Yet this analysis, while it discloses to us in a 

 striking way the ' unity of composition ' of psychic processes, in 

 reality only enables us to understand the mechanism of intellect 

 and the laws of its empiric development. We may, indeed, reduce 

 the infinite variety of the facts of thought to two simple facts, viz. 



