Darwin and the humanities / [James Mark Baldwin].

  • Baldwin, James Mark, 1861-1934.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Darwin and the humanities / [James Mark Baldwin]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The highest functions of thought are thus to be looked upon as experimental; they never entirely lose that reference to actual situations which shows their origin in the genetic pro- cesses mentioned. Even the supposedly native or a priori principles of knowledge are of the nature of postulates which have proved useful in the organization of knowledge ; a point carried further in chapter iv below. As to the actual origin of the different typical ‘ faculties ’ of the older psychologists—perception, memory, imagination, thought—we may look upon them as progressive variations in mental endowment, each having its utility, and each in turn fixed by selection. There is no difficulty in establishing the enormous utility of each of these faculties, as has been intim- ated above. We may suppose residual processes left by actual experiences serving in their day until established by variation in the form of memory.1 The experimental use of memory images, with corresponding success and utility, that the dog acts spontaneously, not ‘ reflectively ’—that is, he does not judge the case to be such and such. The dog’s ‘ abstract ’ or ‘ general ’ is in a sense quasi-logical (‘ quasi-rational ’ in the old sense of that term) or ‘ almost logical ’ ; the fully logical requires a recog- nition of the different cases as similar, and the judgment that justifies common action upon them. 1 Personally to me this Darwinian way of looking at the origin and function of memory is much more reasonable—in the present state of the actual evidence at any rate—than the somewhat obscure hypo- thesis of Iiering (1870), taken up by Semon and Francis Darwin, to the effect that memory is an original function of organized matter, operating as between one generation and another to effect the trans- mission of the effects of experience. See F. Darwin’s Pres. Address, Brit. Ass., Dublin, 1908 ; Science, Sept. 18 and 25, 1908 ; and R. Semon, Die Mnerne als erhaltendcs Princip, etc. (1904). The analogy is carried further toward mysticism by Haeckel, who says (Darwin and. Modern Science), quoting from his paper on ' Perigenesis ’ (1876): “ Heredity is the memory of the plastidules and variability their power of comprehension.”