550 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



not any idea, feeling, or power in the human mind, which, in order to 

 account for it, requires that its origin should be referred to any other 

 source than experience," and by this he means the experience of the in- 

 dividual. How strong his feeling was against the a priori view is illus- 

 trated by a further passage in the Autobiography. He says : " Whatever 

 may be the practical value of a true philosophy of these matters, it is 

 hardly possible to exaggerate the mischiefs of a false one. The notion 

 that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or conscious- 

 ness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in 

 these times the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad insti- 

 tutions. By the aid of this theory, every inveterate belief and every in- 

 tense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dis- 

 pense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into 

 its own all-sufficient voucher and justification. There never was such an 

 instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices." Mr. Spen- 

 cer, on the contrary, held that the intuitionalists are right in this, that the 

 ideas, feelings, and powers of the mind cannot be explained as originating 

 in the experience of the individual, but that there are intuitions or capaci- 

 ties of knowing born with us. But, instead of merely assuming these with 

 the intuitionalists as ultimate principles beyond explication, he maintains 

 that they originate in the experiences of the race which have been accu- 

 mulated and transmitted to the individual in his organization. Intuitions 

 are thus affirmed, but their basis is laid in hereditary life, and the law of 

 evolution thus becomes the key to the deepest interpretation of mental 

 phenomena. 



In his recent able work, entitled Principles of Mental Physiology, Dr. 

 Carpenter remarks: " No physiologist can deem it improbable that the 

 intuitions which we recognize in our own mental constitution have been 

 acquired by a process of gradual development in the race corresponding to 

 that which we trace by observation in the individual. . . . The doctrine 

 that the intellectual and moral intuitions of any one generation are the 

 embodiments in its mental constitution of the experiences of the race was 

 first explicitly put forth by Mr. Herbert Spencer, in whose philosophical 

 treatises it will be found most ably developed." Dr. Carpenter further- 

 more says that " the great master of the experiential school, Mr. J. S. Mill, 

 was latterly tending toward the acceptance of this view," the evidence of 

 which is given in the following quotation from a letter of Mr. Mill upon 

 the subject to Dr. Carpenter: "There is also considerable evidence that 

 such acquired facilities of passing into certain modes of cerebral action 

 can in many cases be transmitted, more or less completely, by inheritance. 

 The limits of this transmission, and the conditions on which it depends, 

 are a subject now fairly before the scientific world ; and we shall, doubt- 



