104 Heredity ', Variation and Genius 



animals and the instincts of the human baby ; and 

 which still regularly fashion in man the auto- 

 matism by which so much of his daily work is 

 done, and without which he would be occupied 

 all his life in learning over and over again to do 

 and in doing with deliberate effort that which he 

 thinks, feels and does in a short time with auto- 

 matic ease and intelligence. Great will be the 

 gain when those who write so fluently and 

 learnedly about mind in the multitudes of maga- 

 zines and books prodigally published and for- 

 gotten month after month and year after year 

 apprehend precisely what reason means organic- 

 ally and are at the pains scrupulously to define 

 what they mean by mental. 



It might seem strange, were any inconsistency 

 in the ordinary thinking of men at all strange, that 

 while they cannot sufficiently admire and laud the 

 infinite varieties of the forms and colours of 

 flowers, of the songs and plumages of birds, of 

 the shapes and motions of animals, and all the 

 exquisitely delicate and complicated ingenuities 

 of architectural structure and beauty which these 

 imply, placidly content to attribute them to natural 

 organic processes, they cannot conceive an equally 

 natural organic process to be capable of fashion- 

 ing the mental organization of an idiot or an 

 Andaman islander, howbeit just skilful enough to 

 fashion that of a monkey. Organic action is able 

 obviously and easily to fabricate all the beauty 

 and mechanism of external nature and the intelli- 



