Life and Habit

IN this chapter I will consider, as briefly as possible, the strongest argument that I have been able to discover against the supposition that instinct is chiefly due to habit....

TO repeat briefly;—we remember best our last few performances of any given kind, and our present performance is most likely to resemble one or other of these; we only remember o...

LET us now return to the position which we left at the end of the fourth chapter. We had then concluded that the self-development of each new life in succeeding generations—the...

IN this chapter we shall show that the law, which we have observed to hold as to the vanishing tendency of knowledge upon becoming perfect, holds good not only concerning acquir...

IT will have been seen that in the preceding pages the theory of evolution, as originally propounded by Lamarck, has been more than once supported, as against the later theory c...

WE have seen that we can apprehend neither the beginning nor the end of our personality, which comes up out of infinity as an island out of the sea, so gently, that none can say...

“A DISTINGUISHED zoologist, Mr. St. George Mivart,” writes Mr. Darwin, “has recently collected all the objections which have ever been advanced by myself and others against the...

IT will be our business in the following chapters to consider whether the unconsciousness, or quasi-unconsciousness, with which we perform certain acquired actions, would seem t...

BUT if we once admit the principle that consciousness and volition have a tendency to vanish as soon as practice has rendered any habit exceedingly familiar, so that the mere pr...

“Instinct is innate, _i.e._, _anterior to all individual experience_.” This I deny on grounds already abundantly apparent; but let it pass. “Whereas intelligence is developed sl...

HERE, then, I leave my case, though well aware that I have crossed the threshold only of my subject. My work is of a tentative character, put before the public as a sketch or de...

LET us assume, for the moment, that the action of each impregnate germ is due to memory, which, as it were, pulsates anew in each succeeding generation, so that immediately on i...

WHAT is true of knowing is also true of willing. The more intensely we will, the less is our will deliberate and capable of being recognised as will at all. So that it is common...

“STRANGE difficulties have been raised by some,” says Bishop Butler, “concerning personal identity, or the sameness of living agents as implied in the notion of our existing now...

Direct reproduction in which a creation reproduces another, the _facsimile_, or nearly so, of itself may perhaps occur among the lowest forms of animal life; but it is certainly...

conclusions, and sometimes almost the conclusions themselves, but he never seems quite to have reached them, nor has he arranged his facts so that others are likely to deduce th...