t and our
attention, and so decide at which points the accumulation of mental
experiences shall begin. It might, accordingly, seem as if there were
no room for any other agency than this; as if the distinction we have
found so useful between 'spontaneous variation,' as the producer of
changed forms, and the environment, as their preserver and destroyer,
did not hold in the case of mental progress; as if, in a word, the
parallel with darwinism might no longer obtain, and Spencer might be
quite right with his fundamental law of intelligence, which says, "The
cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the frequency
with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has
been repeated in experience."[15]

{247}

But, in spite of all these facts, I have no hesitation whatever in
holding firm to the darwinian distinction even here. I maintain that
the facts in question are all drawn from the lower strata of the mind,
so to speak,--from the sphere of its least evolved functions, from the
region of intelligence which man possesses in common with the brutes.
And I can easily show that throughout the whole extent of those mental
departments which are highest, which are most characteristically human,
Spencer's law is violated at every step; and that as a matter of fact
the new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are
originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental
out-births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the
excessively instable human brain, which the outer environment simply
confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or
destroys,--selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and
social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort.

It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences of a
simple order are very literal. They are slaves of habit, doing what
they have been taught without variation; dry, prosaic, and
matter-of-fact in their remarks; devoid of humor, except of the coarse
physical kind which rejoices in a practical joke; taking the world for
granted; and possessing in their faithfulness and honesty the single
gift by which they are sometimes able to warm us into admiration. But
{248} even this faithfulness seems to have a sort of inorganic ring,
and to remind us more of the immutable properties of a piece of
inanimate matter than of the steadfastness of a human will capable of
alterna