Habit and instinct / by C. Lloyd Morgan.

  • C. Lloyd Morgan
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Habit and instinct / by C. Lloyd Morgan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    increment of human faculty in successive generations is an established fact. As we shall presently see, there are careful thinkers who are not prepared to admit it as a fact at all. But if these be right in denying the fact, the consideration of the Lamarckian answer is unnecessary, and we must seek another solution of the problem. This is that evolution has been transferred from the organism to his environment. There must he increment somewhere, otherwise evolution is impossible. In social evolution on this view, the increment is by storage in the social environment to which each new generation adapts itself, with no increased native power of adapta- tion. In the written record, in social traditions, in the manifold inventions which make scientific and industrial progress possible, in the products of art, and the recorded examples of noble lives, we have an environment which is at the same time the product of mental evolution, and affords the condition of the development of each individual mind to-day. No one is likely to question the fact that this environment is undergoing steady and progressive evolution. It is not perhaps so obvious that this transference of evolution from the individual to the environment may leave the faculty of the race at a standstill, while the achievements of the race are pro- gressing by leaps and bounds. This is no new doctrine. Buckle, in his “History of Civilization,” wrote as follows : * “Whatever, therefore, the moral and intellectual progress of men may be, it resolves itself not into the progress of natural capacity, but into a progress, if I may say so, of opportunity; that is, an improvement in the circumstances under which that capacity after birth comes into play. Here then is the gist of the whole matter. The progress * “ History of Civilization,” vol. i. (1858), p. 178. Quoted in Dr. Reid’s “ Present Evolution of Man,” p. 179.
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