Genetic Modes 307 



yet to be achieved. And it is plain that this must be so. 

 The congenital, whether organic or mental, is a variation, 

 selected just by reason of its close-fitting character upon 

 this fact, relation, or need in life ; while the other characters 



— the plastic, mobile, intelligent — have their chance and 

 their utility only in the shifting, change-exhibiting sorts of 

 experience to which the genetic growth process must con- 

 form, but which it can never really exhaust. This distinction 

 reflects itself in the entire system of mental accommoda- 

 tions — what is called above the * determination of thought,' 



— in an aspect of mental growth, a general attitude 

 which in so far directly antagonizes the fixities of the con- 

 genital and immediate, and holds a brief for relative truth, 

 relative life, relative right — since the world itself as a 

 whole, by being itself a world of change and growth, is a 

 system of relative parts. 



Consciousness, therefore, not only accepts the old, by 

 those adaptations by which it categorizes the familiar ; it 

 also finds the new and welcomes it. In the accommoda- 

 tions to the social environment and to tradition through 

 which the consciousness of self makes what progress it 

 does into this stage or that, an ideal arises to embody 

 just this consciousness of the relativity of all possible con- 

 crete determinations of mental content or conduct. Were 

 reality fixed and were adaptation ended, ideals would be 

 impossible. Whence the thought of progress toward the 

 better, the more fit — in whatever sphere, — if all were 

 now attained, and the future had no largess, no rewards, 

 no unexplored tracts, no new realities to confront and 

 possibly to subdue us ? We cope with the new, indeed, by 

 this tentative outreach toward it, armed with our catego- 

 ries of description and interpretation. In so far as these 



