too, the deliverances of our common-sense derive their trustworthiness from what we consider the "self-evidence" of the propositions affirmed. This inquiry brings us face to face with one of the great philosophical problems of our day, which has been discussed by logicians and metaphysicians of the very highest ability as leaders of opposing schools, with the one result of showing how much can be said on each side.
By the intuitionalists it is asserted that the tendency to form these primary beliefs is inborn in man, an original part of his mental organization; so that they grow up spontaneously in his mind as its faculties are gradually unfolded and developed, requiring no other experience for their geneses than that which suffices to call these faculties into exercise. But, by the advocates of the doctrine which regards experience as the basis of all our knowledge, it is maintained that the primary beliefs of each individual are nothing else than generalizations which he forms of such experiences as he has either himself acquired or has consciously learned from others, and they deny that there is any original or intuitive tendency to the formation of such beliefs, beyond that which consists in the power of retaining and generalizing experiences.
I have not introduced this subject with any idea of placing before you even a summary of the ingenious arguments by which these opposing doctrines have been respectively supported; nor should I have touched on the question at all, if I did not believe that a means of reconcilement between them can be found in the idea that the intellectual intuitions of any one generation are the embodied experiences of the previous race. For, as it appears to me, there has been a progressive improvement in the thinking power of man; every product of the culture which has preceded serving to prepare the soil for yet more abundant harvests in the future.
Now, as there can be no doubt of the hereditary transmission in man of acquired constitutional peculiarities, which manifest themselves alike in tendencies to bodily and to mental disease, so it seems equally certain that acquired mental habitudes often impress themselves on his organization, with sufficient force and permanence to occasion their transmission to the offspring as tendencies to similar modes of thought. And thus, while all admit that knowledge cannot thus descend from one generation to another, an increased aptitude for the acquirement, either of knowledge generally or of some particular kind of it, may be thus inherited. These tendencies and aptitudes will acquire additional strength, expansion, and permanence, in each new generation, from their habitual exercise upon the materials supplied by a continually-enlarged experience; and thus the acquired habitudes produced by the intellectual culture of ages will become "a second nature" to every one who inherits them.[1]
- ↑ I am glad to be able to append the following extract from a letter which Mr. John Mill, the great Master of the Experimental School, was good enough to write to me a few months since, with reference to the attempt I had made to place "Common-Sense" upon this basis (Contemporary Review, February, 1872): "When states of mind in no respect innate or instinctive have been frequently repeated, the mind acquires, as is proved by the power of Habit, a greatly-increased facility of passing into those states; and this increased facility must be owing to some change of a physical character in the organic action of the Brain. There is also considerable evidence that such acquired facilities of passing into certain modes of cerebral action can in many cases be transmitted, more or less completely, by inheritance. The limits of this power of transmission, and the conditions on which it depends, are a subject now fairly before the scientific world; and we shall doubtless in time know much more about them than we do now. But so far as my imperfect knowledge of the subject qualifies me to have an opinion, I take much the same view of it that you do, at least in principle."
