A METAPHYSICAL DISCUSSION 225 



our own personal intuition and its expression in our activities, 

 and then we assume that activities in other individual bodies 

 similar to ours are also the expressions of individual life intuitions. 



So, in an individual, human career, we seem to see the gradual 

 cessation of intuition : first, the loss of creative mental power at 

 a relatively early period of life ; then the slackening of the feelings 

 of initiative and responsibility, and a progressive stagnation of in- 

 tellect with increasing domination of habit. Then follow the loss of 

 reproductive power and senile decay. What remains of life becomes 

 concentrated in the effort to give bodily metabolism the peculiar 

 " vital " directions, and little by little even that fails and ceases. 



What is transmitted in the act of reproduction is the vital 

 impetus; in reproduction a life intuition dissociates, one part 

 remaining as the parental body, and the other part becoming the 

 offspring. All the powers of life that manifest themselves in the 

 functioning and actions characteristic of the parental organism 

 are conveyed, in reproduction, to the offspring. What is not 

 conveyed is the memory of the former and, in general, the new 

 form of acting which it acquires in the course of its individual 

 experience. Just as death ends the individuality and personal 

 continuity of the parental organism, so in giving birth to a new 

 individual that personality dissociates itself. 



The Working Out of Intuition. The life intuition of one 

 individual is incommunicable, as such, to another. No process 

 of instruction conveys the knowledge of life in itself; what is 

 conveyed is the materialisation of that life intuition. If there is 

 any way in which feeling and thought can be transmitted from 

 one organism to another otherwise than by an action, we do not 

 know of it. What we are told by modern " spiritualism " as to 

 the possibility of " telepathy" and the like does not come within 

 the purview of science, and, at the very best, those results are 

 grossly materialistic ones, and are their own refutation; it is not 

 " spirit " that the " seances " disclose to us, but matter. 



And the individual and personal life intuition is not trans- 

 mitted from parent to offspring. Heredity is the communication 

 of motor and chemical habit. Form, the idiosyncrasies of acting, 

 moies of functioning these are transmitted. It is the generalised 

 intuition that passes over in reproduction. 



In the interpretation of the thoughts and intuitions of other 

 people, and in the interpretation of our own thought and intuition, 

 what we have to do with are the physico-chemical expressions of 

 those thoughts and intuitions. Life manifests itself " objec- 

 tively " in no other way. 



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