io8 A Factor in Evolution 



' It is very probable, as far as the early life of the child 

 may be taken as indicating the factors of evolution, that 

 the main function of consciousness is to enable him to 

 learn things which natural heredity fails to transmit ; and 

 with the child the fact that consciousness is the essential 

 means of all his learning is correlated with the other fact 

 that the child is the very creature for which natural he- 

 redity gives few independent functions. It is in this field 

 only that I venture to speak with assurance ; but the same 

 point of view has been reached by Weismann and others 

 on the purely biological side. The instinctive equipment 

 of the lower animals is replaced by the plasticity for 

 learning by consciousness. So it seems to me that the 

 evidence points to some inverse ratio between the impor- 

 tance of consciousness as factor in evolution and the need 

 of the inheritance of acquired characters as such a factor ' 

 (from an earlier page). 



These two influences, therefore, furnish a double resort 

 against Lamarckism. And I do not see anything in the 

 way of considering the fact of organic selection, from which 

 both these resources spring, as being a sufficient supple- 

 ment to the principle of natural selection. The relation 

 which it bears to natural selection, however, is a matter 

 of further remark below, in this chapter. 



§ 6. Functional Selection 



In the preceding discussions we have been endeavouring 

 to interpret facts. By recognizing certain facts we have 

 reached a view which considers individual accommodation ^ 



1 Cf. the * Subjective Selection ' of Professor James Ward (with his allusion 

 to this paper) in his Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. I. p. 294. As * subjec- 

 tive' it is evidently limited to the ' psychogenic' I do not find that Professor 



