not dependent on experience 35 



would be not the enormous advance from 

 jelly-fish to mammal, which is what we find, 

 but rather a practically stationary state. 

 For consider the parallel case of social pro- 

 gress referred to earlier. The main factor 

 in such progress we found was heredity. 

 Imagine then, if you can, what would happen 

 if now from this time forth every new gene- 

 ration had to begin where the old began and 

 not where it left off^; if no single human 

 product from now onwards outlasted the 

 individual who produced it ; if in short all 

 tradition and inheritance were from hence- 

 forth no more. Such a breach of social 

 continuity between the future and the past 

 would surely be startling; and yet it is 

 an even greater discontinuity that Weismann 

 seemed to imagine as marking ofi" the Pro- 

 tozoa from the Metazoa. The Lamarckian 

 factor good up to that point has, in his 



3—2 



