No. 594] SHORTER ARTICLES AND DISCUSSION 



As this social or cultural transmission concerns human beings, 

 it is of more immediate interest to the normal unschooled mind 

 than the transmission which gives organs, instincts and peculi- 

 arities to animals and plants. It is therefore recognized much 

 sooner than the processes which guide biological or organic trans- 

 mission. It needs no proof that in his development man was 

 concerned far earlier with himself than with animals or other 

 parts of nature. It is well known, for instance, that the animism 

 which is accepted as the basis of all religion, anthropomorphizes 



animals, plants and objects. 



It is only recently, accordingly, that the world lias paid any 

 true attention to organic heredity, whereas since the beginning 

 of human existence there has been recognition of social inher- 

 itance. History, the science of human society, is, even in a 

 relatively advanced form, several thousand years old, and as a 

 rudiment has enough interest to appeal to savages. Biology, the 

 science of the organic, has an age of barely two centuries. 



It is significant that the first theory of organic evolution, that 

 of Lamarck, resorted wholly to the explanation of use inheritance 

 borrowed from social inheritance. A second stage was reached 

 when Darwin introduced the organic factor of selection, though 

 refusing to break with the older explanation. A last phase was 

 inaugurated when Weismann insisted that organic phenomena 

 must be interpreted solely by organic processes. 



The priority of reasoning by analogy over reasoning by means 

 of a specific mechanism is a world-wide historical phenomenon. 

 The two modern views of evolution and creation are found as 

 crude cosmic philosophies in the mythologies of the im.st primi- 

 tive savages, as well as in the thinking of Hindus, Semlt ^ 

 Greeks, and Eomans. But they occur, one as an analog} vi 1 1 ^ 

 familiar phenomenon of manufacture or making ot o ).]«'< s >\ 

 hand, the other as an analogy with the equally familiar phenom- 

 ena of birth and growth. What modern science has done is to 

 adopt these age-old and crude ideas, as it has adopted the hali- 

 mytlmlodc concepts of the atom and ether, and put them to new 

 use. Only the uneducated think of Darwin as the originator of 

 the doctrine of evolution. What he originated was an organic 

 and in his day new mechanism, by which the old concept of evo- 

 lution could be explained and therefore supported. 



The distinction between the social and the organic is far from 



