How then are we to account for this innate indifference in the capacity of individuals, unless by supposing it to be proportioned to the length of time during which, or the degree of intensity with which, the ancestors of the individuals have had their minds occupied in the particular branch of culture for which capacity is shown? Unfortunately the difficulty of tracing the channel of hereditary transmission stands in the way of obtaining any certainty on this point, although the labours of our Vice-President, Mr. Galton, have already thrown much light on this interesting subject. But on this assumption, it is easy to account for the more perfect action of instinct in the lower animals than in men, when it is considered that the minds of their progenitors must have been confined to the experience of those particular things for which instinct is shown, far longer than is the case with man; and this brings us to the point which has an important bearing upon the question before us, viz. that every action which is now performed by instinct, has at some former period in the history of the species been the result of conscious experience.
But, in adopting this theory, it is not necessary to assume that the ideas themselves have been communicated by hereditary transmission. The doctrine of innate ideas, exploded by Locke, I believe, can never again establish itself. What is inherited is no doubt a certain organization of the nervous system, which, by repeated use through many generations, aided by natural selection, has become exquisitely adapted to the recognition of experience of a particular kind, and which, by the constant renovation that is going on within the body, has grown in harmony with those experiences, so that, when the spring is touched, as it were, the machinery is at once set in motion; but, until the necessary external conditions are presented to the mind, there can be no consciousness of them in the mind. The mind creates nothing apart from experience; its function is limited to building with the materials presented to it through the medium of the senses. The broader the basis of experience, the more lofty the superstructure that can be raised upon it. Or, to use the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer[4], ‘the supposition that the inner cohesions are adjusted to the outer persistencies by accumulated experience of these outer persistencies, is in harmony with all our actual knowledge of mental phenomena. Though in so far as reflex actions and instincts are concerned, the experience hypothesis seems insufficient; yet, its seeming insufficiency occurs only where the evidence is beyond our reach. Nay, even here, such few facts as we can get, point to the conclusion that automatic physical connexions result from the registration of experiences continued for numberless generations.’ And further on he says: ‘In the progress of life at large, as in the progress of the individual, the adjustment of inner tendencies to outer persistencies must begin with the simple and advance to the complex, seeing that, both within and without, complex relations, being made up of simple ones, cannot be established before simple ones have been established.’
From the foregoing considerations it follows that, in studying the evidence of intellectual progress, the phenomena which we may expect to observe are—firstly, a continuous succession of ideas; secondly, that the complexity of the ideas will be in an increasing ratio in proportion to the time; and thirdly, that the tendency to automatic action upon any given set of ideas will be in proportion to the length of time during which the ancestors of the individual have exercised their minds in those particular ideas. Hence it follows, as a corollary to this, that at the present time the tendency to automatic action will be greater in the lower animals than in the higher, because the minds of their progenitors have been exercised in the simple ideas, for which instinct is shown, for a greater length of time than those of the higher animals, amongst whom the simpler ideas have, at a comparatively recent period in the history of the race, been replaced, or otherwise modified, by ideas of a more complex character, which latter have not yet had time to become instinctive. And this is in accordance with what is practically observed in nature.
Now, in applying these principles to the study of progress in man, we must expect to find that the phenomena observed will be in proportion to the spaces of time we have to deal with in treating of man as compared with animals in general.
Assuming this psychological standard of humanity to have been at the level at which we find the highest of the lower animals that exist at the present time, we may suppose primaeval man to have been so far acquainted with the use of tools as to be able to employ a stone for the purpose of cracking the shells of nuts, but incapable of trimming the stone into any form that would answer his purpose better than that into which it had been shaped by rolling in a river bed or upon the seashore.
By the repeated use of stones for this and similar purposes, it would be found that, as Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, they sometimes split in the hand, and that the sharp edges of the fractured portions were more serviceable than the stones before fracture. By constant repetition of the same occurrence, there would grow up in the mind of the creature an association of ideas between the fracture of the stone and the saving of labour effected by the fractured portion, and also a sequence of ideas by which it would be perceived that the fracture of the stone was a necessary preliminary to the other, and ultimately, by still continued repetition, the creature would be led to perform the motions which had been found effectual in cracking the stone before applying it to the purposes for which it was to be used. So also in using the various natural forms of the branches of trees which fell into his hands, it would be found that particular forms were of use for particular purposes; and by constant repetition there would arise an association of ideas between those forms and the purposes for which they were useful, and he would begin to select them for such purposes; and in proportion to the length of time during which this association of ideas continued to exist in the minds of successive generations of the creatures which we may now begin to call men, would be the tendency on the part of the offspring to continue to select and use these particular forms, more or less instinctively—not, indeed, with that unvarying instinct which in animals arises from the perfect adaptation of the internal organism to external condition, but with that modified instinct which assumes the form of a persistent conservatism.
‘The savage,’ says Mr. Tylor, ‘is firmly, obstinately conservative. No man appeals with more unhesitating confidence to the great precedent-makers of the past; the wisdom of his ancestors can control against the most obvious evidence of his own opinions and actions.’
In a similar manner mankind would be led to the conception of many other ideas, but of the majority of them no record would be preserved; it is only where the ideas have been associated with material forms that any record of them would be kept in prehistoric times; and this brings us to what I conceive to be the object of an anthropological collection—to trace out, by means of the only evidence available, the sequence of ideas by which mankind has advanced from the condition of the lower animals to that in which we find him at the present time, and by this means to provide really reliable materials for a philosophy of progress. We may not be able to find in these objects any associations that may lead us to form an estimate of the highest aspirations of the mind at any period of its development, but their importance to anthropologists consists in their value as evidence. Affording us as they do the only available evidence of man in his most primitive condition, they are well worthy of our attention, in order that by studying their grammar, we may be able to conjugate their forms.
Yet, although our data are thus limited to the material arts of mankind, only a small portion of those of prehistoric races are available for our purpose. As already said, only those tools and implements which were constructed of durable materials have remained; the rest have perished, and we have only the implements of existing savages by which to judge of them. The question, therefore, is, to what extent they may be taken as the representatives of the implements of prehistoric men, seeing that in point of time they are contemporaneous with the arts of the most civilized races, and not with those of prehistoric races.