Chap. XII.] AND PERCEPTION. 187 



increased and modified in a manner related to tlie new 

 developments and modifications taking place in the regis- 

 tering mechanism itself. 



There must, therefore, from the very nature of things, 

 always exist an organized continuity in the mental phe- 

 nomena possible to organisms, quite independent of the 

 nature of the phenomena themselves — that is, whether 

 they be high or low, complex or simple. The mental 

 processes, moreover, whose nervous substrata are fully 

 organized, would, in accordance with this view and with 

 the doctrine of hereditary transmission, always represent 

 what is most permanent or habitual in the experiences 

 of the race. Mind thus truly becomes, and cannot be 

 other than, a faithful reflex of the vital relations and 

 activities of the organism. 



The doctrine of ' Inherited Acquisition ' is not only 

 widely applicable in explanation of the genesis of Mind in 

 the animal series ; it suffices, moreover, to reconcile the 

 adverse doctrines of the ' Transcendental ' and the ' Em- 

 pirical ' schools of Philosophy. It shows that the former 

 were right in a certain sense, in contending for the exist- 

 ence of ' innate ideas ' ; though, looked at from a larger 

 point of view, it strongly tends to confirm the views of the 

 experiential school of philosophy. All knowledge comes 

 from ' experience ' — not from that of the individual, except 

 to a comparatively small extent, but rather from that of the 

 race. This in the main is transmitted, by the inheritance 

 of the ancestral type of nervous mechanism, which, in pre- 

 ceding countless generations, has been slowly attuned to cer- 

 tain modes of action, and needs only the incidence of certain 

 impressions to set it going. This is now no mere theory. 

 In so far as it concerns Perceptions and Instinctive Acts, 

 the doctrine may be regarded as substantially proved — 

 the highly interesting observations and experiments of 



