heritage, instinct, or
innate endowment, furnishes a striking confirmation of the foregoing
observations. Power that has been laboriously acquired and stored up as
statical in one generation manifestly in such case becomes the inborn
faculty of the next; and the development takes place in accordance with
that law of increasing speciality and complexity of adaptation to
external nature which is traceable through the animal kingdom; or, in
other words, that law, of progress from the general to the special in
development which the appearance of nerve force amongst natural forces
and the complexity of the nervous system of man both illustrate. As the
vital force gathers up, as it were, into itself inferior forces, and
might be said to be a development of them, or, as in the appearance of
nerve force, simpler and more general forces are gathered up and
concentrated in a more special and complex mode of energy; so again a
further specialisation takes place in the development of the nervous
system, whether watched through generations or through individual life.
It is not by limiting our observations to the life of the individual,
however, who is but a link in the chain of organic beings connecting
the past with the future, that we shall come at the full truth; the
present individual is the inevitable consequence of his antecedents in
the past, and in the examination of these alone do we arrive at the
adequate explanation of him. It behoves us, then, having found any
faculty to be innate, not to rest content there, but steadily to follow
backwards the line of causation, and thus to display, if possible, its
manner of origin. This is the more necessary with the lower animals,
where so much is innate.'[2]

[2] Maudsley on the Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, p. 73.

The special laws of inheritance are indeed as yet unknown. All which is
clear, and all which is to my purpose is, that there is a tendency, a
probability, greater or less according to circumstances, but always
considerable, that the descendants of cultivated parents will have, by
born nervous organisation, a greater aptitude for cultivation than the
descendants of such as are not cultivated; and that this tendency
augments, in some enhanced ratio, for many generations.

I do not think any who do not acquire--and it takes a hard effort to
acquire--this notion of a transmitted nerve element will ever
understand 'the connective tissue' of civilisation. We