322 Heredity. 



of intelligence takes place in the individual. It proceeds by a 

 gradual evolution. The mind can at first grasp simple facts, then 

 more complex ones, next simple relations, and then relations more 

 and more complicated. Each stage of this progress has its con- 

 dition in an anterior progress, which must have been realized 

 previously, and which alone makes the following one possible. 

 The intelligence may be compared to a building, in which each 

 course of masonry must be laid securely in order to receive 

 another. Or, if with certain contemporary philosophers we com- 

 pare the act of cognition to a correspondence between the in- 

 ternal states of the subject and the external states of the object, 

 we may say that the mind must first correspond with very simple 

 relations in order to rise to those which are highly complex. 



This difference, about which there is no question in theory, is 

 forgotten in practice. Doubtless where there are problems strictly 

 dependent on one another, as in mathematics, the mind cannot 

 but follow the natural course ; but in the domain of the social and 

 political sciences, nothing is more common than for people to begin 

 at the end. Hence so many vain theories and erroneous doctrines, 

 the mind being unable to understand what is complex, since it 

 has not first grasped what is simple. For it is a mistake to 

 suppose that it is sufficient to bring a gifted, intelligent mind face 

 to face with such and such facts, and that it will understand them 

 a-t once. A thousand instances prove the contrary. Let a person, 

 intelligent, but of imperfect culture, read Grecian or Roman 

 history, and we are surprised, amazed, at the misinterpretation's 

 he will make of it. The Middle Ages abounded in blunders of 

 this sort whenever an attempt was made to describe a world 

 different from that which then existed. See how the Trojan war, 

 Caesar and Alexander are travestied in the poems of chivalry, or in 

 the quaint pictures of the fifteenth century. 1 This is shown still 

 better by an example from savage life. A native of New Zealand, 

 intelligent and curious, connected with the chief families of his 

 country, accompanied an English traveller to London for educa- 



1 For example, see at the Campana Museum the adventures of Theseus 

 and Ariadne, with cavaliers, pages, churches, goihic houses, narrow streets, 

 battlements, etc. 



