Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/545

No. 5.] and so on, — all of these Professor James bases on cortical peculiarities which have come into the line of our inheritance by the "back door" of spontaneous biologic development. Among other of these a priori mental occurrences Professor James includes our aesthetic and moral judgments.

But in ourselves, more precisely what are these strange aesthetic feelings, based on natural genesis, but not let in by correspondent sensations of our own experience? And how do they work ? First, I answer, they are not so strange after all; and, secondly, they work on a footing with all other conscious processes. The paths of our primary or pleasure sense are not the only associative or connective paths which our cortex has inherited. At birth the cortex is braided through and through with associative paths, probably of every kind of sense. Unquestionably the arrangement inherited by every sense system has somewhat to do with the manner in which it shall be stimulated. Thus, a stimulation of the retina must, by necessity, first go to the optic centre rather than to the auditory centre. There must be a vast number of optic cells in the cortex which are not direct terminals of optic fibres. There is little doubt that the paths to these are as fixed at birth as is the route up from the retina. It is such cells and paths with which those inherited from our primary sense stand on essentially common footing.

The more we look at the matter, the more it seems probable that the number and the arrangement of all the sensory paths and cells in the body are likely to be pretty much the same in the child as in the adult, and not very different among most men. Rather, it is the manner in which these paths work and are used that determines the 'make-up' of our mental lives. Most men inherit the same number and general arrangement of legs, arms, and features, yet there is abundance of variety in individuals. I am inclined to believe that most of the neural paths, even in the cortex, and of whatever kind of sense they be, are, as paths, fixed forever congenially; that the whole is the result of an untold period of selected adaptation of inner possibilities to outer possibilities; that we must, therefore, look