a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents
should represent or support one another better. The husband has an
interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker
gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a
help-mate at home to take thought for his daily necessities. Parents
lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow
their parents with a vicarious immortality.

[Sidenote: Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth.]

The long childhood in the human race has made it possible and needful to
transmit acquired experience: possible, because the child's brain, being
immature, allows instincts and habits to be formed after birth, under
the influence of that very environment in which they are to operate; and
also needful, since children are long incapable of providing for
themselves and compel their parents, if the race is not to die out, to
continue their care, and to diversify it. To be born half-made is an
immense advantage. Structure performed is formed blindly; the _a priori_
is as dangerous in life as in philosophy. Only the cruel workings of
compulsion and extermination keep what is spontaneous in any creature
harmonious with the world it is called upon to live in. Nothing but
casual variations could permanently improve such a creature; and casual
variations will seldom improve it. But if experience can co-operate in
forming instincts, and if human nature can be partly a work of art,
mastery can be carried quickly to much greater lengths. This is the
secret of man's pre-eminence. His liquid brain is unfit for years to
control action advantageously. He has an age of play which is his
apprenticeship; and he is formed unawares by a series of selective
experiments, of curious gropings, while he is still under tutelage and
suffers little by his mistakes.

[Sidenote: The naturally dull achieve intelligence.]

Had all intelligence been developed in the womb, as it might have been,
nothing essential could have been learned afterward. Mankind would have
contained nothing but doctrinaires, and the arts would have stood still
for ever. Capacity to learn comes with dependence on education; and as
that animal which at birth is most incapable and immature is the most
teachable, so too those human races which are most precocious are most
incorrigible, and while they seem the cleverest at first prove
ultimately the least intell