dividual must follow the same course
as the genesis of knowledge in the race. In strictness, this principle
may be considered as already expressed by implication; since both, being
processes of evolution, must conform to those same general laws of
evolution above insisted on, and must therefore agree with each other.
Nevertheless this particular parallelism is of value for the specific
guidance it affords. To M. Comte we believe society owes the enunciation
of it; and we may accept this item of his philosophy without at all
committing ourselves to the rest. This doctrine may be upheld by two
reasons, quite independent of any abstract theory; and either of them
sufficient to establish it. One is deducible from the law of hereditary
transmission as considered in its wider consequences. For if it be true
that men exhibit likeness to ancestry, both in aspect and character--if
it be true that certain mental manifestations, as insanity, occur in
successive members of the same family at the same age--if, passing from
individual cases in which the traits of many dead ancestors mixing with
those of a few living ones greatly obscure the law, we turn to national
types, and remark how the contrasts between them are persistent from age
to age--if we remember that these respective types came from a common
stock, and that hence the present marked differences between them must
have arisen from the action of modifying circumstances upon successive
generations who severally transmitted the accumulated effects to their
descendants--if we find the differences to be now organic, so that a
French child grows into a French man even when brought up among
strangers--and if the general fact thus illustrated is true of the whole
nature, intellect inclusive; then it follows that if there be an order
in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge,
there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of
knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically
indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind
through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is _not_
intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why
education should be a repetition of civilisation in little. It is
provable both that the historical sequence was, in its main outlines, a
necessary one; and that the causes which determined it apply to the
child as to the race. Not to specify th