3io Heredity. 



These philosophers have, in the first place, made an excellent, 

 radical, and decisive criticism of the old empiricism. * To accept/ 

 says Spencer, ' the untenable assertion that prior to experience the 

 mind is a blank is to overlook the very root of the question, viz. 

 Whence comes the faculty of organizing sensations ? ... If at 

 birth there exists nothing but a purely passive receptivity of im- 

 pressions, why could not a horse receive the same education as a 

 man ? . . . Why should not the cat and the dog, subjected as they 

 are to the same experiences obtained in domestic life, attain to the 

 same degree and the same kind of intelligence ? Under its current 

 form, the experience hypothesis implies that the presence of a 

 nervous system organized in a certain way is an unimportant cir- 

 cumstance, a fact that need not be taken into account, yet it is the 

 most important fact of all.' 1 



Cognition is necessarily the product of two factors : first, we 

 have what is presented to the mind, the internal or external phe- 

 nomena, form, colour, agreeable or disagreeable sensations, etc. ; 

 and then we have what the mind itself offers the laws of thought, 

 which connect the phenomena, and reduce to order this indis- 

 ciplined and confused mass. This was clearly seen and well shown 

 by Kant. But the philosophers of whom we speak, while they 

 admire him, reproach him with having regarded the laws of thought 

 as ultimate, irreducible, and inexplicable facts, instead of investi- 

 gating their genesis. ' Kant and his disciples/ says Mr. Lewes, 

 * taking up the adult human mind, considered its constituent forms 

 as initial conditions? ' These forms/ say they, ' are implied in each 

 individual experience.' Certainly, for if they were not so implied 

 they never could be got out of them. This explanation is logically 

 perfect, but it is of no service for psychology, which has to resolve 

 a question of origin. Reasoning a priori, we might say that the 

 vertebrate type is the necessary form which makes the vertebrate 

 possible. This will do in anatomy, but it is false in morphology, 

 which shows that the typical form results from the successive 

 > phases of the animal's development. Kant anatomized cognition 

 weir enough, but he disregarded its morphology. 



What, then, are these mysterious forms of thought ? Like the 



1 Psychology, 2nd ed., 208. 



