ssion
should best be, so that they then had living significance in the mouths
of those who used them, though they have become such mere shibboleths and
cant formulae to ourselves that we think no more of their meaning than we
do of Julius Caesar in the month of July. They continue to be reproduced
through the force of habit, and through indisposition to get out of any
familiar groove of action until it becomes too unpleasant for us to
remain in it any longer. It has long been felt that embryology and
rudimentary structures indicated community of descent. Dr. Darwin and
Lamarck insisted on this, as have all subsequent writers on evolution;
but the explanation why and how the structures come to be
repeated--namely, that they are simply examples of the force of habit--can
only be perceived intelligently by those who admit such unity between
parents and offspring as that the self-development of the latter can be
properly called habitual (as being a repetition of an act by one and the
same individual), and can only be fully sympathised with by those who
recognise that if habit be admitted as the key to the fact at all, the
unconscious manner in which the habit comes to be repeated is only of a
piece with all our other observations concerning habit. For the fuller
development of the foregoing, I must refer the reader to my work "Life
and Habit."
The purposiveness, which even Dr. Darwin (and Lamarck still less) seems
never to have quite recognised in spite of their having insisted so much
on what amounts to the same thing, now comes into full view. It is seen
that the organs external to the body, and those internal to it, are the
second as much as the first, things which we have made for our own
convenience, and with a prevision that we shall have need of them; the
main difference between the manufacture of these two classes of organs
being, that we have made the one kind so often that we can no longer
follow the processes whereby we make them, while the others are new
things which we must make introspectively or not at all, and which are
not yet so incorporate with our vitality as that we should think they
grow instead of being manufactured. The manufacture of the tool, and the
manufacture of the living organ prove therefore to be but two species of
the same genus, which, though widely differentiated, have descended as it
were from one common filament of desire and inventive faculty. The
greater or less complexity of
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