Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/602

586 achievement had filled men's minds; and they were not easily freed from a sort of bondage to the great concepts which he had impressed upon them. Indeed, it was finally through the influence of a biological hypothesis that the popular liberation at length came.

The logical bearing of Weismannism upon the problems of evolutionary ethics was very slowly discerned. Spencer attacked the theory most obstinately, as if he conceived that its implications were fatal to the integrity of his own great system of thought. And very generally it was supposed that the doctrine of the non-transmission of acquired characters meant that all intellectual and moral progress were results of mere natural selection, operating upon fortuitous congenital variations. Almost simultaneously it occurred to an English and an American psychologist that exactly the opposite conclusion was properly to be drawn,—that the elimination of use-inheritance proved the more convincingly the importance of an inheritance that is not innate in the body at all, but into the possession of which each man enters in the course of his individual experience,—the social inheritance, the accumulations of tradition. This inference agreed perfectly with the psychological observations made by these scholars themselves, as well as with those of previous thinkers. The significance of this result for ethical speculation was that it minimized the bearing upon ethical problems, of the ever uncertain analysis of the factors of organic evolution. For whether these factors be few or many, or whatever their character may be, all other factors are, in social evolution, completely over-shadowed by the processes of imitation and of the reorganization of the imitated material in the growing mind. Thus from a new quarter was reinforced the conclusion, upon which clear-sighted thinkers were already insisting, that the evolution which is important for ethics is social evolution, and this studied, not by way of biological analogies, but through the direct medium of psychology. Another consequence, which, I suppose, is less generally appreciated, is the great emphasis which is thus placed upon ontogenetic study. So long as the origin of the specific moral