344 The American Xatuntllst. 



fects of constant use of an organism are inherited, while sports and 

 mutilations are not inherited. The importance, of the social influences 

 among men on which Prof. Baldwin justly lays so much stress, consists 

 in the fact that they are continuous in their operation, and produce 

 permanent habits. This accounts for the phenomena referred to by 

 him when he remarks that " the level of culture in a community seems 

 to be about as fixed a thing as moral qualities are capable of being ; 

 much more so than the level of individual endowment, This latter 

 seems to be capricious or variable, while the former moves by a regu- 

 lar movement and with a massive front." Here we have portrayed 

 exactly what occurs in structural evolution. The habitual influence of 

 the environment, internal and external, conditions the steady advance, 

 while sports produce only temporary effects or are effective only in 

 proportion to their ratio to the entire movement. 



In an essay published in Science of March 20th, 1896, Prof. Bald- 

 win comments on the lectures of Prof. Lloyd Morgan, in support of 

 his own doctrine of Social Heredity. This is the name he has applied 

 to this transmission of habits through their persistence in societies, so 

 that the young acquire them through imitation or instruction, without 

 the intervention of physical heredity. As a foundation for this view 

 he disputes the necessity of any inheritance of acquired habits by the 

 inheritance of the nervous mechanism which they express, and denies 

 therefore that use is a necessary agent in the evolution of such habits. 

 In order to prove that instincts are not " lapsed intelligence " he says ; 

 " The intelligence can never by any possibility create a new movement 

 or effect a new combination of movements, if the apparatus of brain, 

 nerve and muscles has not been made ready for the combination which 

 is effected. This point is no longer in dispute," etc. Immediately 

 before this, however, he says. "But let us ask how the intelli- 

 gence, brings about coordinations of muscular movement. The phys- 

 chologist is obliged to reply ; " Only by a process of selection (through 

 pleasure, pain, experience, association, etc.,) from certain alternative 



It is granted in the last quotation that pleasure, pain and other 

 conscious states, select the motions which become habits. Such selec- 

 tion is intelligent, and such act is an expression of intelligence, though 

 of the simplest sort. All that Prof. Baldwin alleges is that intelli- 

 gence is impotent to construct the mechanism of new habits out of 

 mechanisms already too far specialized in definite directions to permit 

 such a reorganization of structure. This truth in nowise 



