bt that he would lead us to
victory? But, at present, we, his environment, who sigh for him and
would so gladly preserve and adopt him if he came, can neither {245}
move without him, nor yet do anything to bring him forth.[13]

To conclude: The evolutionary view of history, when it denies the vital
importance of individual initiative, is, then, an utterly vague and
unscientific conception, a lapse from modern scientific determinism
into the most ancient oriental fatalism. The lesson of the analysis
that we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with
which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to the
energy of the individual. Even the dogged resistance of the
reactionary conservative to changes which he cannot hope entirely to
defeat is justified and shown to be effective. He retards the
movement; deflects it a little by the concessions he extracts; gives it
a resultant momentum, compounded of his inertia and his adversaries'
speed; and keeps up, in short, a constant lateral pressure, which, to
be sure, never heads it round about, but brings it up at last at a goal
far to the right or left of that to which it would have drifted had he
allowed it to drift alone.

I now pass to the last division of my subject, the function of the
environment in _mental_ evolution. After what I have already said, I
may be quite concise. Here, if anywhere, it would seem at first sight
as if that school must be right which makes the mind passively plastic,
and the environment actively productive of the form and order of its
conceptions; which, in a word, thinks that all mental progress must
result from {246} a series of adaptive changes, in the sense already
defined of that word. We know what a vast part of our mental furniture
consists of purely remembered, not reasoned, experience. The entire
field of our habits and associations by contiguity belongs here. The
entire field of those abstract conceptions which were taught us with
the language into which we were born belongs here also. And, more than
this, there is reason to think that the order of 'outer relations'
experienced by the individual may itself determine the order in which
the general characters imbedded therein shall be noticed and extracted
by his mind.[14] The pleasures and benefits, moreover, which certain
parts of the environment yield, and the pains and hurts which other
parts inflict, determine the direction of our interes