e in childhood, but deteriorates
very often as the higher faculties come into use; and indeed we cannot
fail to see how the introduction of printing, writing, and mnemonic arts
and artifices of all kinds, has lowered the average power of civilized
memory, and made the ordinary feats of more primitive times seem to us
magical and incredible. We also notice the high development of hearing,
sight, and other forms of perception among savages who live by their
five senses rather than by their wits. When we descend to the
animal-world we are confronted by cognitive faculties whose effects we
see, but of whose precise nature we can form no conjecture whatever.
That which guides the migratory birds in their wanderings, and simulates
polity in the bee-hive and ant-hill, is not reason, but is something for
practical purposes far better than reason. Putting a number of these and
of similar considerations together seems to suggest that development in
the direction of self-instruction (which is reason) and self-management
and independence, is loss as well as gain.

What we gain is no doubt our own in a truer sense than that we had when
we hung upon Nature's breast, and were guided passively by instincts and
intuitions to purposes that reason can never reach to.

By far the most wonderful and seemingly intelligent work of the soul is
that by which it builds up, nourishes, repairs, developes, and finally
reproduces the body it dwells in. Yet in all this it is almost as
passive and unconscious as a vegetable. The effect is (as far as our
comprehension of it goes) altogether preternatural and inexplicable; yet
it is far less _our_ effect than what we do by reason and by taking
thought. What we pay for in dignity we lose in efficiency. While Nature
carries us in her arms we move swiftly enough, but when she sets us on
our feet to learn independence and self-rule, we cut a sorry figure. In
our helplessness she does all for us as though we were yet part of her;
but in the measure that we are weaned and begin to fend for ourselves as
responsible agents, we are deprived of the aids and easements befitting
the childhood of our race.

If this be true, if man in his primitive state possessed intuitive
powers which have sunk into abeyance, either through the diversion of
psychic energy to the development of other powers, or through desuetude,
or as the instincts of the new-born babe are lost when their brief
purpose is fulfilled; if the occasi