250 The American Naturalist. 



whether its importance is because it is through the c 

 of it that the organic aspect gets in its work. Or, to take a higher form 

 of consciousness, does the memory of an object as having given pleasure 

 help an organism to get that object a second time ? This may be true, 

 although it is only the physical basis of memory in the brain that has 

 a causal relation to the other organic processes of the animal. 



Conceiving of the function of consciousness, therefore, as in any case 

 not a cleus ex machina, the question I wish to raise is whether it can 

 have an essential place in the development process as the Preformists 

 construe that process. Professor Cope believes n 

 to appear fully in his proposed book. I believe t 

 sciousness may be the same— and may be the ess< 

 Cope gives it in his left-hand column and which I give it in mv Met&U 

 I), ,, lopment—on the Preformist view. I have argued briefly for this 

 indifference to the particular theory one holds of heredity, in my book 

 (Chap. VIL), reserving for a further occasion certain arguments in 

 detail based upon the theory of the individual's personal relation to his 

 social environment. The main point involved, however, may be briefly 

 indicated now, although, for the details of the social influences appealed 

 to, I must again refer to my book (Chaps, on « Suggestion ' and « Emo- 



I have there traced out in some detail what other writers also have 

 lately set in evidence, I. e., that in the child's personal development, his 

 ontogenesis, his life history, he makes a very faithful reproduction of his 

 social conditions. He is, from childhood up, excessively receptive to 

 social suggestion ; his entire learning is a process of conforming to 

 social patterns. The essential to this, in his heredity, is excessive in- 

 stability, cerebral balance and equilibrium, a readiness to overflow into 

 the new channels which his social environment dictates. He has to 

 learn everything for himself, and in order to do this he must begin in a 

 state of great plasticity and mobility. Now, my point, but briefly, is 

 that these social lessons which he learns for himself take the place 

 largely of the heredity of particular paternal acquisitions. The father 

 must have been plastic to learn, and this plasticity is, as far as evidence 

 goes, the nervous condition of acute consciousness ; the father then 



child does the same. What he inherits is nervous plasticity and the 

 consciousness. He learns particular acts for himself; and what he 

 learns is, in its main line, what his father learned. So he is just as well 

 off, the child of Preformism, as if he had been the heir of the particular 

 lessons of his father's past. I have called this process ' Social Hered- 



