Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/517

 Till: NOKM L BBLF, I hold it to be both inevitable and just, so long as the Origins to which appeal is made have been first genuinely established by the best available inductions, and have not been merely postulated a priori, or else borrowed from a sister science on to whose broad shoulders the whole responsibility for their truth is dexterously shifted. Now Sociological Origins such as a writer on Ethics may be presumed to have studied with some care do not, I contend, in the least bear out the fundamental character of the dis- tinction at issue. Biological Origins, on the other hand, in the strictest sense I mean, the history of the movements of the primordial cell in response to its environment carry us so far back into the ' elemental prime ' that physical and psychical grounds for any distinction of the sort are alike bound to vanish utterly. Somewhere comparatively high in the scale of biological progress where the differentiation of sex begins, or else where the social animal proper, tin- member of the family or the pack, comes into view there only, it is plain, can the rudiments of a Tribal Self as such be discovered ; and even here the extreme obscurity of this early period of natural history is bound to assist prejudice in giving the facts the ' twist ' preferred. It is therefore rather 011 the sociological than on the biological evidence in support of the distinction which I should like to see substituted for Clifford's that I would lay chief stress. I am, for one thing, personally quite incompetent to lay down the law on any matter pertaining to Biology. On the other hand, I doubt whether there can be found any better guide than general probability when once we have plunged into what Edmond About would have called ' biologie crdpuscu- laire '. I feel, therefore, all the more justified in referring to a recent work of Mr. H. R. Marshall entitled Instinct and Reason as giving what is at any rate a fairly plausible account of the provenance of the Individual, Sexual and Social Instincts in Man, which, if true, would entirely stultify Clifford's postulation of an original bifurcation of tendency corresponding to the two kinds of Self that he distinguishes. Meanwhile, the biological hypothesis in question is likewise so completely out of harmony with the general principles of evolution as commonly conceived that even the mere philosopher may be pardoned if he venture to attack it. The Tribal Self, according to Clifford, is the product of group-competition and the Individual Self the product of individual competition. Hence there may be presumed to lie at the bottom of this view the notion of discrete blocks, as it were, of instinct existing side by side in the organism