302 The Unity of the Organism 



families are troubled with such diseases in their mother's 

 womb; but because they are born with the disposition or 

 faculty of contracting them."^^ ^}^q^ ^fter further quota- 

 tions to the same effect Huxley writes: "Whoever denies 

 what isj in fact, an inconceivable proposition, that sensations 

 pass, as such, from the external world into the mind, must 

 admit the conclusion here laid down by Descartes, that, 

 strictly speaking, sensations, and a fortiori, all the other 

 contents of the mind, are innate. Or, to state the matter in 

 accordance with views previously expounded, that they are 

 products of the inherent properties of the thinking organ, in 

 which they lie potentially, before they are called into exist- 

 ence by their appropriate causes." 



The upshot of this clearly is that innate for Descartes and 

 Huxley means hardly anything else than hereditary, as ap- 

 plied to the psychical as well as to the physical attributes of 

 animals. The ample justification in our day of the view 

 that psychical attributes are hereditary should, it would 

 seem, restore to full standing in biology, the conception of 

 innate ideas — only, of course, in a very different sense from 

 that into which later Idealists have perverted it. 



It is in this discussion that Huxley makes one of the most 

 direct and unanswerable arguments against materialism that 

 can be made: "The more completely the materialistic posi- 

 tion is admitted, the easier it is to show that the idealistic 

 position is unassailable, if the idealist confines himself with- 

 in the limits of positive knowledge."^^ That is to say, if the 

 materialist insists that all traces of innateness of ideas and 

 other contents of the mind must be repudiated, he virtually 

 contends that heredity of whatever sort, whether of physical 

 or psychical attributes, must be repudiated. With this con- 

 ception of innateness in the entire psychic aspect of the 

 organism before him Huxley asks: "What is meant by ex- 

 perience .^" 



"It is the conversion," he replies, "by unknown causes, of 



