238 JOSEPH JOHN MURPHY 
organizing intelligence as a mere semblance and illusion, 
due to the unintelligent agency of natural selection among 
spontaneous unguided variations; and in the science of 
mind a similar attempt is made to resolve mental’ intelli- 
gence into a resultant from unintelligent elements, put 
together and moulded into form by the unintelligent agency 
of the association of ideas. Consequently, when, in opposi- 
tion to this phase of opinion, I endeavoured to vindicate 
tke old truth of the existence of intellectual and spiritual 
principles discernible in nature and in mind, though derived 
from a source transcending nature, | was compelled to begin 
by inquiring how much can be accounted for by unin- 
teligent agencies, and especially by the laws of habit and 
variation ; and then to make intelligence,—both organizing 
intelligence and mental intelligence,— appear as a residual 
ultimate fact, which must be recognised as the explanation of 
phenomena which are inexplicable without it. 
Habit is defined, for my purpose, with the utmost possible 
generality ; including, in the organic sphere, the law of 
heredity ; and in the mental sphere, memory, or the perpetua- 
tion of impressions in consciousness, with the laws of the 
association of ideas. ‘To give a full account of my conclusions 
as to the relation between habit and intelligence, would be to 
give an abstract of a great part of my book on the subject : and 
this would be neither desirable nor admissible on the present 
occasion. What I purpose to do is to show how the relation 
between intelligence, as the originating factor, and habit, as 
the perpetuating factor, exists in language as well as in the 
evolution of living individuals and species; and how this 
relation bears on the principles expounded in Prof. Max 
Miiller’s recent work on the Science of Thought. 
It is scarcely a metaphor to call language an organism. 
The definition of organization is, that the parts of the organism 
are all in functional relation with each other; and the words of 
a sentence are thus functionally related. But there are living 
species, such as those of the genera Gromia and Ameba, to 
which we do not refuse the name of organisms, in which, 
nevertheless, the most powerful microscopes show no trace of 
structure or organization, and the perfect independence of 
the life of their every part makes it almost certain that they 
really have neither, although they show their living nature in 
motion, nutrition, growth, and reproduction. These, how- 
ever, are the lowest kinds of living beings; in all but the 
very lowest, the living forces of the organism construct an 
organized body, consisting, according to our definition, of 
functionally distinct parts; and the increasing efficiency of 
