Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/156

144 thinking and acting," and reason as "the faculty which is concerned in the conscious adaption of means to ends by virtue of acquired non-inherited knowledge and ways of thinking and acting," it will be perceived that I have sharply marked off all that is instinctive from all that is rational, leaving no border-space where the one merges into the other. In this, however, I believe I am at variance with all other writers who have dealt with the question from the standpoint of evolutionists. These, with whom alone we are here concerned, generally derive the one faculty from the other, in which case there must of course be a border-space. "Spencer regards instinct as 'compound reflex action, and the precursor of intelligence' (i.e. reason), while Lewes regards it as 'lapsed intelligence,' and therefore necessarily the successor of intelligence. Thus while Lewes maintains that all instincts must originally have been intelligent, Spencer maintains that no instinct need ever have been intelligent." Professor Romanes, from whom I have quoted, is in partial agreement and disagreement with both Mr. Lewes and Mr. Spencer, thinking that in some cases the one is right, and in some cases the other. All three authors base their theories on the assumption that acquired mental variations are capable of transmission and therefore of accumulation.

It is a matter of common experience that the performance of any complex action becomes more easy for frequent repetition, till, if the action be repeated frequently enough, the performance of it becomes automatic; that is, the performance of it is accompanied less and less by a sense of mental effort, till at length no sense of such effort is present in consciousness. Thus we learn to walk, to speak, to read, to write with difficulty, but in time constant practice makes these complicated actions so easy that we perform them with scarcely any, if any, sense of mental