688 PSYCHOLOGY. 



Since, says Mr. Spencer, the accidental variations of all 

 parts of the body are independent of each other, if the 

 entire organization of animals were due to such accidental 

 variations alone, the amount of mutual adaptation and har- 

 mony that we now find there could hardly possibly have 

 come about in any finite time. We must rather suppose that 

 the divers varying parts brought the other parts into har- 

 mony with themselves by exercising them ad hoc, and that 

 the eifects of the exercise remained and were passed on to 

 the young. This forms, of course, a gve&i presumption against 

 the all-sufficiency of the view of selection of accidental 

 variations exclusively. But it must be admitted that in 

 favor of the contrary view, that adaptive changes are in- 

 herited, we have as yet perhaps not one single unequivocal 

 item of positive proof. 



I must therefore end this chapter on the genesis of our 

 mental structure by reaffirming my conviction that the so- 

 called Exjierience-philosophy has failed to prove its point. 

 No more if we take ancestral experiences into account than 

 if we limit ourselves to those of the individual after birth, 

 can we believe that the couplings of terms within the mind 

 are simple coj)ies of corresponding couplings impressed 

 upon it by the environment. This indeed is true of a small 

 part of our cognitions. But so far as logical and mathe- 

 matical, ethical, sesthetical, and metaphysical propositions 

 go, such an assertion is not only untrue but altogether 

 unintelligible ; for these propositions say nothing about 

 the time- and space-order of things, and it is hard to un- 

 derstand how such shallow and vague accounts of them as 

 Mill's and Spencer's could ever have been given by think- 

 ing men. 



The causes of our mental structure are doubtless natural, 

 and connected, like all our other peculiarities, with those of 

 our nervous structure. Our interests, our tendencies of at- 

 tention, our motor impulses, the esthetic, moral, and 

 theoretic combinations we delight in, the extent of our 

 power of apprehending schemes of i elation, just like the 

 elementary relations themselves, time, space, difi'erence and 

 similarity, and the elementary kinds of feeling, have all 



