Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/376

362 be reduced to rule and definitely expressed, yet the error is perennial of regarding logic as reason, and calculations, necessarily imperfect from the extent and complexity of the forces at work, as sound judgment.

The modern view that human intelligence is due to the experiences of the race organized in the brain gives an explanation to a very interesting group of facts. When the education of an individual is totally unlike that received by his line of progenitors, it cannot take deep root in his nature. Every conscientious Christian missionary laments the difficulty of making a really deep impression on a pagan mind. The momentum of ages cannot be changed in direction in a single-life, and, if it could, the pledges of human progress, which after all are based on human permanence, would be done away. In the conflict between inherited instincts and personally-acquired convictions, it is as if the man were attempting to fight all his ancestry at once, and he is usually worsted in the fray. Natural historians are familiar with the survival in animals of habits once useful to them in the distant past, but in their changed conditions no longer so. Some reptiles now living on land possess the remnants of organs once used in their perfection by their remote ancestry in aquatic life. In a somewhat parallel way, the superstitions of our progenitors persist in many persons of undoubted common-sense. Madame de Staël said, when asked if she believed in ghosts, "No, but I am afraid of them." When we consider the great problems of life and death in hours of calm reason, our reflections are apt to take a direction very different from that along which our instinctive feelings may impel us in seasons of pain and distress. It is a poor apology for a crude theological belief that our instincts declare it to be true, however much reason may contradict it. Instinct has no infallibility: in the human mind it is simply the register of thoughts and experiences during the long, primitive ages of our race; and our own opinions formed by personal accumulation since birth more probably point toward truth, than the lines of feeling laid down in our fibres in times of struggling intelligence and fierce strifes with natural powers, awful and unknown. In the conflict between instinct and reason, it would be strange indeed to contemn that reason which is only a better instinct than we have now, in the making. The study of race-impulses in an individual makes clear why it is that a man will do generous, heroic deeds, from which it is impossible for him to derive advantage. He acts as he does not from calculation, but from instinctive incitements inherited from parentage of noble blood; the line of race-benefit may not always coincide with that of individual good, but the impetus of ancestral forces transcends self-regard, and leaves the account of debit and credit apparently unbalanced. Not only are human instincts at times noble and heroic, but also, unfortunately more often, cruel and destructive. When a war breaks out, or any great public dissension arises, how speedily can the thin plating of civilization be abraded