Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/584

564 speaking, experience any individual act of consciousness twice over; but as, by pulling the bell-cord to-day we can, in the language of ordinary discourse, produce the same sound we heard yesterday, so, while the established connections among the nerves and nerve-centres hold, we are enabled to live our experiences over again. Now, why should not those modifications of brain-matter that, enduring from hour to hour and from day to day, render acquisition possible, be, like any other physical peculiarity, transmitted from parent to offspring? That they are so transmitted is all but proved by the facts of instinct, while these, in their turn, receive their only rational explanation in this theory of Inherited Association.—Nature.



VIII.—The Educational Bias.

T would clear up our ideas about many things, if we distinctly recognized the truth that we have two religions. Primitive humanity has but one. The humanity of the remote future will have but one. The two are opposed; and we who live midway in the course of civilization have to believe in both.

These two religions are adapted to two conflicting sets of social requirements. The one set is supreme at the beginning; the other set will be supreme at the end; and a compromise has to be maintained between them during the progress from beginning to end. On the one hand, there is the necessity of social self-preservation in face of external enemies. On the other hand, there is the necessity of cooperation among fellow-citizens, which can exist only in proportion as fair dealing of man with man creates mutual trust. Unless the one necessity is met, the society disappears by extinction, or by absorption into some conquering society. Unless the other necessity is met, there cannot be that division of labor, exchange of services; consequent industrial progress and increase of numbers, by which a society is made strong enough to survive. In adjustment to these two antagonist necessities, there grow up two antagonist codes of duty; which severally acquire supernatural sanctions. And thus we get the two coexisting religions the—religion of enmity and the religion of amity.

Of course, I do not mean that these are both called religions. Here I am not speaking of names; I am speaking simply of things. Nowadays, men do not pay the same nominal homage to the religion of enmity that they do to the religion of amity—the religion of amity