xc REPORT—1874. 
Spencer. His illustrations possess at times exceeding vividness and force ; 
and from his style on such occasions it is to be inferred that the ganglia of 
this Apostle of the Understanding are sometimes the seat of a nascent 
poetic thrill. 
It is a fact of supreme importance that actions the performance of which at 
first requires even painful effort and deliberation, may by habit be rendered 
automatic. Witness the slow learning of its letters by a child, and the subse- 
quent facility of reading in a man, when each group of letters which forms a 
word is instantly, and without effort, fused to a single perception. Instance 
the billiard-player, whose muscles of hand and eye, when he reaches the per- 
fection of his art, are unconsciously coordinated. Instance the musician, who, 
by practice, is enabled to fuse a multitude of arrangements, auditory, tactual 
and muscular, into a process of automatic manipulation. Combining such 
facts with the doctrine of hereditary transmission, we reach a theory of 
Instinct. A chick, after coming out of the egg, balances itself correctly, runs 
about, picks up food, thus showing that it possesses a power of directing its 
movements to definite ends. How did the chick learn this very complex 
coordination of eye, muscles, and beak? It has not been individually 
taught ; its personal experience is nil; but it has the benefit of ancestral 
experience. In its inherited organization are registered all the powers 
which it displays at birth. So also as regards the instinct of the hive-bee, 
already referred to. The distance at which the insects stand apart when 
they sweep their hemispheres and build their cells is “ organically remem- 
bered.” Man also carries with him the physical texture of his ancestry, as 
well as the inherited intellect bound up with it. The defects of intelligence 
during infancy and youth are probably less due to a lack of individual expe- 
rience than to the fact that in early life the cerebral organization is still 
incomplete. The period necessary for completion varies with the race, and 
with the individual. As around shot outstrips a rifled one on quitting the 
muzzle of the gun, so the lower race in childhood may outstrip the higher. 
But the higher eventually overtakes the lower, and surpasses it in range. As 
regards individuals, we do not always find the precocity of youth prolonged to 
mental power inmaturity; while the dulness of boyhood is sometimes strikingly 
contrasted with the intellectual energy of after years. Newton, when a boy, 
was weakly, and he showed no particular aptitude at school; but in his 
eighteenth year he went to Cambridge, and soon afterwards astonished his 
teachers by his power of dealing with geometrical problems. During his 
quiet youth his brain was slowly preparing itself to be the organ of those 
energies which he subsequently displayed. 
By myriad blows (to use a Lucretian phrase) the image and superscription 
of the external world are stamped as states of consciousness upon the organ- 
ism, the depth of the impression depending upon the number of the blows. 
When two or more phenomena occur in the environment invariably together, 
they are stamped to the same depth or to the same relief, and indissolu- 
bly connected. And here we come to the threshold of a great question. 
Seeing that he could in no way rid himself of the consciousness of Space and 
Time, Kant assumed them to be necessary “ forms of intuition,” the moulds 
and shapes into which our intuitions are thrown, belonging to ourselves 
solely and without objective existence. With unexpected power and success 
Mr. Spencer brings the hereditary experience theory, as he holds it, to bear 
upon this question. ‘If there exist certain external relations which are 
experienced by all organisms at all instants of their waking lives—relations 
which are absolutely constant and uniyersal—there will be established an- 
