Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/79

18 have to be acknowledged as a priori. This factor issues from the nature of the mind that has the experience, and introduces into experience all that distinguishableness, that arrangedness, and that describable form, without which it could not be conceived as apprehensible or intelligible, that is, as an experience at all.

The almost surprisingly happy thought of Mr. Spencer and his school at this juncture — to turn the flank of Kant and his “pure reason” by applying the conception of evolution to the origin of ideas, and thus explaining a priori knowing away — does not do the work it was contrived for. It is certainly adroit to say that cognitions which in us human beings are felt as irresistible, as if part of the nature of things and incapable of change or of alternative, are simply the result in us of transmitted inheritance; that our remote ancestral predecessors had these cognitions at most as associations only habitual, regarding which no incapability of exception was felt, and that our feeling them as necessities is merely the result of their coming to us through generation after generation of successive ancestors, handing on their accumulated associations in ever increasing mass and cohesion. But this clever stroke cannot get rid of Kant’s suggestion, that in order to the solidifying of associations in any consciousness there must be some principle — some