108 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



consciousness except the cumulation of purely sensational experience, 

 which not only may but must vary with the position of the intellects 

 interpreting it — that truth, therefore, is nothing but the inveteracy 

 of error— is the dreariest creed ever promulgated ; and its association 

 with the many noble truths of which John Stuart Mill has been the 

 discoverer or the champion, is the most unfortunate " inseparable 

 association" established in recent times. And it is deplorable that 

 Herbert Spencer, who has the merit of being one of the most energetic 

 fumigators of the intellectual atmosphere of our time, should evince a 

 disposition to make concessions to such a creed, and endeavor to eke 

 out its shortcomings by the doctrine (in itself, no doubt, both sound 

 and fertile) of the inheritance of ancestral tendencies of the mind. 

 His own theory leads to conclusions utterly subversive of Mill's doc- 

 trine ; for, if organic life (including the life of the mind) has been 

 continuously evolved from inorganic matter, then the lines of our 

 ancestry run into all the phenomena of the material world, and the 

 order of these phenomena must be ingrained, not only in the structure 

 of our bodies, but also in the constitution of our minds. Or, to express 

 it in the language of modern comparative psychology : the ancestral 

 inheritance of our intellects must embrace, not only the associations 

 established by experience between the phenomena of consciousness in 

 the minds of our progenitors, but also the regularity in the evolution 

 of the natural events which gave rise to these phenomena — the laws 

 of Nature. These laws must, therefore, in a certain sense, be prefigu- 

 rations of the forms of our intellect, so that, after all, there is truth in 

 the sentence of Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things, and 

 sense in the words of Goethe (almost identical with a passage in Plo- 

 tinus), that the eye sees the light, because it is of solar nature. I do 

 not, of course, mean to stand committed to this argument in the form 

 in which it is here presented, not entertaining the notions respecting 

 the relations between organic and inorganic forms which underlie it, 

 and doubting that the continuity of the evolution of these forms is 

 truly represented by current beliefs. But, with the proper modifica- 

 tion of its premisses (which, however, cannot be affected by a few ver- 

 bal definitions), I believe the argument in favor of the a priori sanity 

 of the human intellect to be valid, in spite of certain structural falla- 

 cies resulting from the laws of its growth, which I shall have occasion 

 to discuss in my next article ; and I further believe the primordial 

 correspondence between the intellect and its objects to be entirely 

 consistent with the theory of evolution, Max Miiller to the contrary 

 notwithstanding. 



