MENTAL AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 133 



bination of innate tendencies, external influences, and 

 effort, both physical and mental, by the individuals 

 composing it. And until the society had made great 

 advances, by the arising of variations in its form and 

 function, and the operation of natural selection, in the 

 survival of the fittest, the productions of genius in 

 literature, art, and mechanics were impossible. A 

 Bacon, a Newton, a Darwin would be impossible in 

 savagery, or barbarism. 



"There is a transmutation of habits, quite as much 

 as of structure, and the former is probably initiative of 

 the latter." (Montgomery.) That statement is de- 

 cidedly Lamarkian. It means that acquired characters 

 are inheritable. It is, also, in line with Meyer's state- 

 ment heretofore referred to, that man's will-to-do, or 

 mental effort, will form new nerve fibres, thrown out 

 by the ganglia, and that the connection of these with 

 other fibres, and brain centers, produce new mental 

 power. At least, the new power given by these new 

 nerves, whether in the form of reason, imagination, or 

 will, by reason of their new channels, is flowing along 

 the line of least resistance. Its effort then becomes so 

 automatic, that it gives one a feeling that it is the 

 effort, that is, the reason, that has produced its own 

 cause. 



LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE. The question of line of 

 least resistance, as well as the attraction of gravita- 

 tion, is, at large, the question of the general diffusion 

 of matter; while the method, or process of such dif- 

 fusion, is that of the nature of motion. Matter 

 perhaps was never wholly quiescent. In that condition 

 of it in the nebula, when it was most homogeneous, we 

 assume its natural tendency to condense, and the 

 theory of evolution requires, that since then, it has 



