56 



lower modes of intellect transmissible ? Are our faculties 

 of abstraction, judgment, ratiocination, invention, governed 

 by heredity, as are our perceptive faculties ? Are common 

 sense, insanity, genius, talent, subtlety, aptitude for abstract 

 studies, hereditary ? " As the unity of the intellect is 

 recognised and admitted by all schools of thought, and as 

 facts undoubtedly prove the heredity of the lower intellectual 

 modes, it must follow as a natural sequence that all the 

 higher forms of the human intellect are also subject to this 

 law. However deeply we inquire into the ultimate nature of 

 intellect, we must accept either one or the other of the two 

 following conclusions : We must either hold, with the 

 materialists, that it is phenomenal, the cause being the 

 organism ; or with the idealists, that it is noumenal, the 

 effect being all that exists or can be known. The materialistic 

 argument is as follows : " If thought is only a property of 

 living matter, then, as heredity is one of the laws of life, it 

 must therefore be also one of the laws of thought ; or, in 

 more precise terms, intellect is a function whose organ is the 

 brain ; the brain is transmissible, as is every other organ, 

 the stomach, the lungs, and the heart ; the function is 

 transmissible with the organ ; therefore intellect is trans- 

 missible with the brain. Physiological heredity involves, as 

 a necessary consequence, psychological heredity in all its 

 forms." 



In contradistinction to this theory is that of the idealists, 

 who hold thought to be the only reality, and who, with 

 Schopenhauer and his school, discover in will the first cause 

 of all things, the supreme reality. Like all other systems, 

 this " must account for the world of sense, for nature, and 

 her phenomena and laws. There being no other absolute 

 existence, save thought, matter must be referred to thought." 



