REPLIES TO CRITICISMS. 307 



It is thus with the pure Empiricists and the pure Transcendentalists. 

 Down to the present time disciples of Locke have continued to hold 

 that all mental phenomena are interpretable as results of accumulated 

 individual experiences ; and, by criticism, have been led simply to 

 elaborate their interpretations: ignoring the proofs of inadequacy. 

 On the other hand, disciples of Kant, asserting this inadequacy, and 

 led by perception of it to adopt an antagonist theory, have persisted 

 in defending that theory under a form presenting fatal inconsistencies. 

 And then, when there is offered a mode of reconciliation, the spirit of 

 no-compromise is displayed: each side continuing to claim the whole 

 truth. After it has been pointed out that all the obstacles in the way 

 of the experiential doctrine disappear if the effects of ancestral expe- 

 riences are joined with the effects of individual experiences, the old 

 form of the doctrine is still adhered to, while Kantists persist in as- 

 serting that the ego is born with intuitional forms which are wholly 

 independent of any thing in the non-ego, after it has been shown that 

 the innateness of these intuitional forms may be so understood as to 

 escape the insurmountable difficulties of the hypothesis as originally 

 expressed. 



I am led to say this by reading the remarks concerning my own 

 views, made with an urbanity I hope to imitate, by Prof. Max Miiller, 

 in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution last March. 1 Before 

 dealing with the criticisms contained in this lecture, I must enter a 

 demurrer against that interpretation of my views by which Prof. Max 

 Mtiller makes it appear that they are more allied to those of Kant than 

 to those of Locke. He says : 



" Whether the prehistoric genesis of these congenital dispositions or inherited 

 necessities of thought, as suggested by Mr. Herbert Spencer, be right or wrong, 

 does not signify for the purpose which Kant had in view. In admitting that 

 there is something in our mind which is not the result of our own a posteriori 

 experience, Mr. Herbert Spencer is a thorough Kantian, and we shall see that 

 he is a Kantian in other respects too. If it could be proved that nervous modi- 

 fications, accumulated from generation to generation, could result in nervous 

 structures, that are fixed in proportion as the outer relations to which they an- 

 swer are fixed, we, as followers of Kant, should only have to put in the place 

 of Kant's intuitions of Space and Time 'the constant space-relations expressed 

 in definite nervous structures congenitally framed to act in definite ways, and 

 incapable of acting in any other way.' If Mr. Herbert Spencer had not misun- 

 derstood the exact meaning of what Kant calls the intuitions of Space and Time, 

 he would have perceived that, barring his theory of the prehistoric origin of 

 these intuitions, he was quite at one with Kant." 



On this passage let me remark, first, that the word " prehistoric," 

 ordinarily employed only in respect to human history, is misleading 

 when applied to the history of Life in general; and his use of it leaves 

 me in some doubt whether Prof. Max Miiller has rightly conceived the 

 hypothesis he refers to. 



1 See Eraser's Magazine of May last. 



