The Psychological Consequences of Heredity. 3 1 5 



that these forms are the result of heredity, we assert that thought 

 itself, as a phenomenon, is a result of heredity. 



As we have seen, the associationist school, while agreeing with 

 Kant as to the necessity of certain forms (time, space, causality) 

 in order to connect experience and to constitute thought, differs 

 from that philosopher by holding these forms to be the result of an 

 evolution. The difference is more radical than would at first 

 sight appear, for in Kant's hypothesis it is the forms of the subject 

 that give shape to the object, while in the other hypothesis the 

 object gives shape to the subject : in the view of the one the 

 universe is dependent on thought, in that of the other thought is 

 dependent on the universe. We would observe, by the way, that 

 the criticism made in France on the association psychology is 

 not well founded. The law of the association of ideas, it is said, 

 having been discovered first, the only originality of this system ot 

 psychology is that it has generalized that law, and endeavoured 

 to bring under it all the operations of thought. But this is a mis- 

 conception in regard to the true originality of this school, which 

 is very different. To assert, as this school does, that the cause of 

 our internal nexus exists in nexus which is external ; that when two 

 phenomena are rarely associated in the object they are also rarely 

 associated in the subject, and that when they are always associated 

 in the object they are always associated in the subject, is to assert, 

 in opposition to Kant, that the laws of cognition depend abso- 

 lutely on the laws of nature, to import mechanism into the intel- 

 lect, and to subject the intellect itself to mechanism as the 

 ultimate law governing its phenomenal development. 



Moreover, the hypothesis of a genesis of the ' forms of thought ' 

 by continuous evolution is not characteristic of the whole asso- 

 ciationist school, but only of those adherents of it who accept 

 universal evolution. We regard it as a simple hypothesis, and 

 only desire to show that it. is not so inadmissible as it may at first 

 appear. 



Starting from the hypothesis of a primordial nebula, we see that 

 the universe must have endured thousands and thousands of years, 

 during which nothing existed but physical and chemical pheno- 

 mena. We cannot tell when or how, or by what series of blind 

 attempts and essays life could be produced. Neither do we know 



