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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. II. No. 34. 



reditary tendency, might also be expected. 

 But consciousness is, of course, the prime 

 variation through which cooperation is se- 

 cured. All of which means, if I am right, 

 that the rise of consciousness is of direct 

 help to the Preformist in accounting for 

 race habits — notably those known as gregar- 

 ious, cooperative, social. 



3. (7 of Cope's table.) "The rational 

 mind is developed by experience, through 

 memory and classification." This, too, I 

 accept, provided the term ' classification ' 

 has a meaning that psychologists agree to. 

 So the question is again : Can the higher 

 mental functions be evolved from the lower 

 without calling in Epigenesis ? I think so. 

 Here it seems to me that the fact of Social 

 Heredity is the main and controlling con- 

 sideration. It is notorious how meagre the 

 evidence is that a son inherits or has the 

 peculiar mental traits of parents beyond 

 those traits contained in the parents' own 

 heredity. Gal ton has shown how rare a 

 thing it is for artistic, literary or other 

 marked talent to descend to the second 

 generation. Instead, we find such exhibi- 

 tions showing themselves in many individ- 

 uals at about the same time, in the same 

 communities, and under the same social 

 conditions, etc. Groups of artists, musi- 

 cians, literary men, appear, as it were, a 

 social outburst. The presuppositions of 

 genius — dark as the subject is — seem to 

 be great power of learning or absorbing, 

 marked gifts or proclivities of a personal 

 kind which are not directly inherited but 

 fall under the head of sports or variations, 

 and then a social environment of high level 

 in the direction of these sports. The de- 

 tails of the individual development, inside 

 of the general proclivitj^ which he has, are 

 determined by his social environment, not 

 by his natural heredity. And I think the 

 phylogenetic origin of the higher mental 

 functions, thought, self-consciousness, etc., 

 must have been similar. I have devoted 



space to a detailed account of the social 

 factors involved in the evolution of these 

 higher faculties in my book. 



I fail to see any great amount of truth in 

 the claims of Mr. Spencer that intellectual 

 progress in the race requires the Epigenesis 

 view. The level of culture in a community 

 seems to be about as fixed a thing as moral 

 qualities are capable of being ; much more 

 so than the level of individual endowment. 

 This latter seems to be capricious or vari- 

 able, w'hile the former moves by a regular 

 movement and with a massive front. It 

 would seem, therefore, that intellectual and 

 moral progress is gi-adual improvement, 

 through improved relationships on the part 

 of the individuals to one another ; a matter 

 of social accommodation, rather than of 

 natural inheritance alone, on the part of in- 

 individuals. It is only a rare individual 

 whose heredity enables him to break 

 through the lines of social tissue and im- 

 print his personality upon the social move- 

 ment. And in that case the only explana- 

 tion of him is that he is a variation, not 

 that he inherited his intellectual or moral 

 power. Furthermore, I think the actual 

 growth of the individual in intellectual 

 stature and moral attainment can be traced 

 in the main to certain of the elements of 

 his social milieu, allowing always a balance 

 of variation in the direction in which he 

 finally excels. 



So strong does the case seem for the So- 

 cial Heredity view in this matter of intel- 

 lectual and moral progress that I may sug- 

 gest an hypothesis which may not stand in 

 court, but which I find interesting. May 

 not the rise of the social life be justified 

 from the point of view of a second utility in 

 addition to that of its utility in the struggle 

 for existence as ordinarily understood, the 

 second utility, i. e., of giving to each gen- 

 eration the attainments of the past which 

 natural inheritance is inadequate to trans- 

 mit? Whether we admit Epigenesis or 



