may have persisted with modifications because it produced another result; and side by side with impulses towards specific acts we can detect in all animals vague and generalised tendencies, often overlapping and contradictory, like curiosity and shyness, sympathy and cruelty, imitation and restless activity.  It is possible, therefore, to avoid the ingenious dilemma by which Mr. Balfour argues that we must either demonstrate that the desire, e.g. for scientific truth, is lineally descended from some one of the specific instincts which teach us ‘to fight, to eat, and to bring up children,’ or must admit the supernatural authority of the Shorter Catechism.[5]

[5] Reflections suggested by the New Theory of Matter, 1904, p. 21.  ’So far as natural science can tell us, every quality of sense or intellect which does not help us to fight, to eat, and to bring up children, is but a by-product of the qualities which do.’

The pre-rational character of many of our impulses is, however, disguised by the fact that during the lifetime of each individual they are increasingly modified by memory and habit and thought.  Even the non-human animals are able to adapt and modify their inherited impulses either by imitation or by habits founded on individual experience.  When telegraph wires, for instance, were first put up many birds flew against them and were killed.  But although the number of those that were killed was obviously insufficient to produce a change in the biological inheritance of the species, very few birds fly against the wires now.  The young birds must have imitated their elders, who had learnt to avoid the wires; just as the young of many hunting animals are said to learn devices and precautions which are the result of their parents’ experience, and later to make and hand down by imitation inventions of their own.

Many of the directly inherited impulses, again, appear both in man and other animals at a certain point in the growth of the individual, and then, if they are checked, die away, or, if they are unchecked, form habits; and impulses, which were originally strong and useful, may no longer help in preserving life, and may, like the whale’s legs or our teeth and hair, be weakened by biological degeneration.  Such temporary or weakened impulses are especially liable to be transferred to new objects, or to be modified by experience and thought.

With all these complicated facts the schoolmaster has to deal.  In Macaulay’s time he used to be guided by his ‘common-sense,’ and to intellectualise the whole process.  The unfortunate boys who acted upon an ancient impulse to fidget, to play truant, to chase cats, or to mimic their teacher, were asked, with repeated threats of punishment,’why’ they had done so.  They, being ignorant of their own evolutionary history, were forced to invent some far-fetched lie, and were punished for that as well.  The trained schoolmaster of to-day takes the existence