The Psychological Consequences of Heredity. 3 1 3 



principle. For if even to external relations that are often ex- 

 perienced during the life of a single organism, answering internal 

 relations are established that become next to automatic if such 

 a combination of psychical changes as that which guides a savage 

 in hitting a bird with an arrow becomes, by constant repetition, so 

 organized as to be performed almost without thought of the pro- 

 cess of adjustment gone through ; and if skill of this kind is so 

 far transmissible that particular races of men become characterized 

 by particular aptitudes, which are nothing else than partially or- 

 ganized psychical connections then, if there exist certain external 

 relations which are experienced by all organisms, at all instants of 

 their waking lives relations which are absolutely constant there 

 will be established answering internal relations that are absolutely 

 constant, absolutely universal. Such relations we have in those of 

 space and time. ... As the substrata of all other relations in 

 the non-^, they must be responded to by conceptions that are 

 the substrata of all other relations in the Ego. Being the constant 

 and infinitely repeated elements of thought, they must become the 

 automatic elements of thought the elements of thought which it 

 is impossible to get rid of the * forms of intuition.' 



From this brief statement of the question it is easy to see that 

 it is one of the highest in all philosophy, as being concerned with 

 the genesis of thought itself. Here we arrive at a first cause : we 

 leave facts and enter on metaphysics. 



Thought is, in fact, one of the forms of the unknowable indeed, 

 the most mysterious of them all. A little reflection suffices to 

 show this. It is certain that the exterior world, the object, is 

 knowable only in so far as it is reducible to thought; that it has 

 no existence for us, save on that same condition ; that in it we 

 see only a sum of phenomena governed by laws ; and as the 

 phenomena are resolved into perceptions, and the laws into ratio- 

 cinations, therefore the whole universe may be resolved into- 

 psychological states. To say, with the idealists, that thought is 

 the measure of all things, so that the limits of our thought are 

 also the limits of reality, is certainly a gratuitous hypothesis ; for 

 we cannot be certain that beyond all actual or possible cognition 

 of ours there are not actual existences for ever unknowable, and 

 we have no warrant for making human thought the absolute 



