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THE AMEBIC AX XATUJtALIST [Vol. XLIII 



back upon us because they are the ingrained methods of 

 early uncritical experience. 



Now the concept of species is roughly equivalent to the 

 concept of kind and this is acquired very early in life. 



" What's 'at?" asks the child, pointing perhaps to its 

 first sharply perceived bird, a robin, say, in the grass. 



"That's a bird, Johnny,— that's a robin." 



' < What 's bird ? What 's robin 1 ' ' 



"Why a bird is a thing with feathers and wings and 

 that flies. And a robin is a kind of bird. There is a 

 whole lot of them alike, with red on their breasts like that 

 one, and that makes one kind; that makes them robins." 



By such experience, such questions and such replies, 

 rapidly extended, the child soon learns the meaning of the 

 word "kind" as it is applied to living things, and later, 

 he transfers this meaning, only a little sharpened, to the 

 word "species." . 



But those of us who have formed and retained the habit 

 of reviewing our childhood thinking know that these 

 meanings, these concepts of kinds, never seemed wholly 

 real to us as children, and this simply because the objects 

 of them were not wholly perceived. This or that kind of 

 bird, as a group, a totality, a whole, was a great vague 

 somewhat, fading out on all sides where it transcended 

 our actual experience ; it was luminous only in the center 

 where actual experience and memory kept is partially 

 real The child ascribes reality to perception, and only 

 semireality to conception. But slowly, in adult life, do 

 we partially free ourselves of the sense of unreality in 

 the objects of our conceptual thought. 



In science, however, we certainly should and do learn to 

 test, judge and finally affirm the realities back of our con- 

 cepts, as well as back of our percepts and simple memory 

 images. We know that unvisited foreign countries are no 

 less real than our own, despite their shadowy vagueness 

 m conception. We ascribe exactly the same reality to 

 the surface of the earth at the south pole that we do to 

 that under our feet, despite that it has never been per- 

 ceived by man. More still, plurality, multiplicity, per- 



