368 PSYCHOLOGY. 



characteristic law of nervous action. The brain grows to 

 the exact modes in which it has been exercised, and the in- 

 heritance of these modes — then called instincts — would 

 have in it nothing surprising. But in man the negation of 

 all fixed modes is the essential characteristic. He owes his 

 whole pre-eminence as a reasoner, his whole human quality 

 of intellect, we may say, to the facility with which a given 

 mode of thought in him may suddenly be broken up into 

 elements, which recombine anew. Only at the price of in- 

 heriting no settled instinctive tendencies is he able to settle 

 every novel case by the fresh discovery by his reason of 

 novel principles. He is, par excellence, the educahle animal. 

 If, then, the law that habits are inherited were found exem- 

 plified in him, he would, in so far forth, fall short of his 

 human perfections ; and, when we survey the human races, 

 we actually do find that those which are most instinctive at 

 the outset are those which, on the whole, are least educated 

 in the end. An untutored Italian is, to a great extent, a 

 man of the world ; he has instinctive perceptions, tendencies 

 to behavior, reactions, in a word, upon his environment, 

 which the untutored German wholly lacks. If the latter be 

 not drilled, he is apt to be a thoroughly loutish personage ; 

 but, on the other hand, the mere absence in his brain of 

 definite innate tendencies enables him to advance by the de- 

 velopment, through education, of his purely reasoned think- 

 ing, into complex regions of consciousness that the Italian 

 may probably never approach. 



"We observe an identical difference between men as a 

 whole and women as a whole. A young woman of twenty re- 

 acts with intuitive promptitude and security in all the usual 

 circumstances in which she may be placed.* Her likes 



* Social and domestic circumstances, that is, not material ones. Per- 

 ceptions of social relations seem very keen in persons whose dealings with 

 the materia) w^orld are confined to knowing a few useful objects, princi- 

 pally animals, plants, and weapons. Savages and boors are often as tact- 

 ful and astute socially' as trained diplomatists. In general, it is probable 

 that the consciousness of how one stands with other people occupies a rela- 

 tively larger and larger part of the mind, the lower one goes in the scale 

 of culture. Woman's intuitions, so fine in the sphere of personal relations, 

 are seldom first-rate in the way of mechanics. All boys teach themselves 

 now a clock goes ; few giils. Hence Dr. Whately's jest, "Woman is the 

 unreasoning animal, and pokes the tire from on top." 



