1896.] Psychology. 251 



ity,' since the child really inherits the details ; but he inherits them 

 from society by this process of social growth, rather than by direct 

 natural inheritance. 



To show this in a sketchy way, I may take the last three points 

 which Professor Cope makes under the Epigenesis column, the points 

 which involve consciousness, and show how I think they may still be 

 true to the Preformist if he avail himself of the resource offered by 

 ' S icial Heredity.' 



I do this rather for convenience than with any wish to controvert 

 Professor Cope ; and it may well be that his later statements may show 

 that even this amount of reference to him is not justified. 



1. (5 of Cope's table). " Movements of the organism are caused or 

 directed by sensation and other conscious states." 



The point at issue here between the advocate of Epigenesis and the 

 Preformist would be whether it is necessary that the child should 

 inherit any of the particular conscious states, or their special nervous 

 dispositions, which the parent learned in his lifetime, in order to secure 

 through them the performance of the same actions by the child. I 

 should say, no ; and for the reason— additional to the usual arguments 

 of the Preformists— that 'Social Heredity ' will secure the same result. 

 All we have to have in the child is the high consciousness represented 

 by the tendency to imitate the parent or to absorb social copies, and 

 the general law now recognized by psychologists under the name of 

 Dynamogenesis— ■*. e., that the thought of a movement tends to dis- 

 charge motor energy into the channels as near as may be to those 

 necessary for that movement. 5 Given these two elements of endow- 

 ment in the child, and he can learn anything that his father did, with- 

 out inheriting any particular acts learned by the parent. And we must 

 in any case give the child this much ; for the principle of Dynamo- 

 genesis is a fundamental law in all organisms, an.] the tendency to take 

 in external 'copies' by imitation, etc., is present in all social animals, 

 as a matter of fact. 



The only hindrance that I see to the child's learning everything that 

 his life in society requires would be just the thing that the advocates of 

 Epigenesis argue for— the inheritance of acquired characters. For 

 such inheritance would tend so to bind up the child's nervous sub- 

 stance in fixed forms that he would have less or possibly no unstable 

 substance left to learn anything with. So, in fact, it is with the animals 

 in which instinct is largely developed ; they have no power to learn 

 any thing new, just because their nervous systems are not in the mobile 



