little is as yet known of the occult causes of mental phenomena to dispense entirely with the great thoughts of the past, and just now there is noticeable a sort of reaction; if not a real Flucht zurück zu Kant, at least a tendency to search through the rubbish of metaphysical speculation for certain golden grains that are found buried in it, and to bring these forth and confront them with the facts that science has revealed.) Everywhere now-a-days one sees evidence of a sort of catabasis from the high throne of pure reason and pure intellect to the humbler sphere of feeling and will, and from the regions of abstraction, reflection, and speculation to the simpler fields of intuitive intellection, for it is here only that there is hope of finding a true scientific basis for the philosophy of mind.

Two other great fields for the operation of the speculative genius need to be mentioned, those of logic and mathematics. This form of the faculty must be regarded as the most remote from the egoistic base of mind. We have seen the intellect leaving self to revel in the search for universal utilities; we have seen it leave utility to sport with the phantoms of its own creation; we have seen it wrapped up in the objective contemplation of the macrocosm without and the microcosm within. We are now to behold it abandoning everything material and losing itself in the purely hypothetical and the purely abstract. .For such is logic and such is geometry, which may be taken as the type of mathematical ideation. Of these two fields, that of logic is the most purely abstract, since geometry may be regarded simply as the application of logic to quantity. Logic deals only with the forms of thought, and therefore requires complete intellectual abstraction. While mathematics is the test or criterion of all science, logic is the test or criterion of all reasoning. Untrammeled by facts or concrete conditions, mathematics reaches the absolutely exact, and all the sciences in the hierarchy seek to approach as closely as possible to its perfect standard. Similarly logic affords the

laws or canons by which all the intellectual operations must square themselves.

But it is not the nature of these intellectual domains that specially concern us, except as this helps us to see how the mind must operate under such circumstances. In mathematics everything is divested of all attributes except those of quantity or number. In logic they are divested of all physical attributes whatever, and reduced to pure intellectual relations. Not, of course, that these quantitative and intellectual relations are not capable of being afterward clothed with a material garb and applied to concrete facts and real things. This is the use and purpose of both logic and mathematics. But before this can be done laws must be discovered which are capable of fitting all possible cases, and in order to do this they must be made absolutely abstract and without condition or dependence upon anything in nature. Abstract reasoning, as it is called, may ́ therefore be regarded as the highest stage which has been attained by the human mind, measuring the ascent exclusively by the degree of divergence from the purely concrete, interested, egoistic base of the intuitive reason This form of development, however, is by no means necessarily a progress in the direction of practical importance No amount of abstract reasoning could save the race from destruction under the law of competition, and not one of the derivative faculties considered in this chapter and the last have the least value in rendering its possessor capable of survival in the general struggle for existence. This is why it is necessary to exempt them from the law of natural selection, and the fact that they have developed is the strongest proof that has ever been presented that a faculty strengthened by use transmits to posterity the increment acquired during the life in which it has been exercised. There is no other way of explaining the increase. The fortuitous commingling of favorable gernis which is offered by Weismann and his disciples as an explanation, is unintelligible and wholly inadequate, and we are forced

to conclude that these biologically useless acquired characters are really transmitted.1

But it will not do to underrate the value of speculative genius to civilization. Invention and scientific discovery have furnished the material factors of civilization, but generalization and speculation, with all the aids of philosophy and scientific reasoning, have given the world an intellectual civilization, without which material progress would have little value.2

1 It would be out of place to argue this point here. I have done this elsewl.ere. See Neo-Darwinism and Neo-Lamarckism: Proc. Biol. Soc. Washington, Vol. VI, 1891, pp. 11–71; The Transmission of Culture: The Forum, Vol. XI, New York, May, 1891, pp. 312-319; Weismann's New Essays: Public Opinion, Vol. XIII, Washington and New York, Sept. 10, 1892, p. 559.

2 Scientific methods bear the same relation to intellectual progress that tools, instruments, machines mechanical contrivances of all sorts bear to material progress. They are intellectual contrivances - indirect ways of attaining results too hard for bare, unaided intellectual strength. As the civilized man is little, if at all, superior to the savage in bare-handed strength of muscle, and the enormous superiority of the former in accomplishing material results is wholly due to the use of mechanical contrivances; even so in the higher sphere of intellect, the scientific man boasts no superiority over the uncultured man in bare, unaided intellectual power. The amazing intellectual results achieved by modern science are due wholly to the use of intellectual contrivances or scientific methods. As in the lower sphere of material progress the greatest benefactors of the race are the inventors or perfectors of new mechanical contrivances or machines, so in the higher sphere of intellectual progress, the greatest benefactors of our race are the discoverers or perfectors of new intellectual contrivances or scientific methods. — Joseph Le Conte: Relation of Biology to Sociology. The Berkeleyan, May, 1887, Vol. XXIII, p. 123 (separately paged reprint, pp. 4-5).

CHAPTER XXXII.

THE INTELLECT.

The mind-force, as popularly understood, is no force, but only a condition. It does not propel, it only directs. It is not mind, except within the narrow limits of this definition, that achieves the vast results which civilization presents, and which, it must be admitted, could not be achieved without it. It is the great social forces which we have been passing in review that have accomplished all this. Mind simply guides them in their course. The office of mind is to direct society into unobstructed channels, to enable these forces to continue in free play, to prevent them from being neutralized by collision with obstacles in their path. In a word, mind has for its function in civilization to preserve the dynamic and prevent the statical condition of the social forces, to prevent the restoration of equilibrium between the social forces and the natural forces operating outside of them. Just as it is not psychological force which propels the water-wheel or the piston which could not, nevertheless, be made to operate without it — but merely the forces of gravity and gaseous expansion compelled by mechanical power under the guidance of intelligence to operate for the benefit of man, so it is not mind which moves the civilization of the world, but only the great and never-ceasing forces of society, which but for the guidance of mind would rush blindly on into a thousand entanglements with rival forces, and assume that position of statical equilibrium which represents social stagnation. --- Dynamic Sociology, I, 698–699.

Alle Physikotheologie ist eine Ausführung des, der Wahrheit entgegenstehenden, Irrthums, dass nämlich die vollkommenste Art der Entstehung der Dinge die durch Vermittelung eines Intellekts sei. Daher eben schiebt diselbe aller tiefern Ergründung der Natur einen Riegel vor. — - SCHOPENHAUER: Welt als Wille, II, 305.

L'histoire de la civilisation peut se résumer en six mots: plus on sait, plus on peut. EDMOND ABOUT: A B C du Travailleur, p. 39.

The long, dark, and winding path that has been followed in the preceding thirty chapters, beginning with Chap. II, has only brought us to the point from which mental philosophy set out, viz., to the intellect. It was seen to exist, but no one

ever attempted to inquire how it came to exist. This has been our special task, and if a way has been opened to a true explanation of the origin and development of the intellect, that task has been performed. But Bacon declares vere scire esse per causas scire, and if the logic of this book is sound we may claim truly to know something about the intellect. Much is being said about psychogenesis, and laudable attempts are being made to explain the genesis of mind, but in most of this it is only its ontogenesis- the history of its development in the individual that has engaged attention. Far more important is its phylogenesis -the history of its development in the race. A bare outline of this field was sketched in the fifth chapter of Dynamic Sociology, but its inadequacy was even then clearly felt, and its only purpose was to place the phenomena of mind in their proper relations to those of life on the one hand, and those of society on the other. While the present work may be looked upon as an expansion of that chapter, still it could not have been written then, because its matter had not been fully thought out, and because several great fields had not as yet been opened up to my mind. Its defectiveness from similar causes is still manifest, and others with the aid of better light will doubtless soon remedy much of this; but it is to be hoped that no backward step will be taken, and that the real origin and nature of mind will yet be made known to men.

Time was, and not long agone, when life was looked upon simply as an observed fact. Now, thanks to Darwin and his predecessors and successors, it is seen as a development, and there is no good reason why mind as a whole, or even the intellect, as the latest expression of the psychic law, should not also be recognized as having had a cause, an origin, and a history. The reason will never be satisfied with any fact until its source is known. All antiquity was doomed to know the river Nile only as a fact, but Nili caput quærere became a proverb that then expressed the restless dissatisfaction of the time with such a state of things, and still expresses the cease