between certain nerve-centres before the thing can
be done, whether it is the acts of the viscera or
the acts of the limbs, or anything of that sort; and
of course it is obvious that if the creature has not
many things to register in his nervous system, if
he has a life which is very simple, consisting of
few actions that are performed with great frequency,
that animal becomes almost automatic in his whole life;
and all the nervous connections that need to be made
to enable him to carry on life get made during the
foetal period or during the egg period, and when he
comes to be born, he comes all ready to go to work.
As one result of this, he does not learn from individual
experience, but one generation is like the preceding
generations, with here and there some slight modifications.
But when you get the creature that has arrived at
the point where his experience has become varied,
he has got to do a good many things, and there is more
or less individuality about them; and many of them
are not performed with the same minuteness and regularity,
so that there does not begin to be that automatism
within the period during which he is being developed
and his form is taking on its outlines. During
prenatal life there is not time enough for all these
nervous registrations, and so by degrees it comes
about that he is born with his nervous system perfectly
capable only of making him breathe and digest food,—of
making him do the things absolutely requisite for
supporting life; instead of being born with a certain
number of definite developed capacities, he has a number
of potentialities which have got to be roused according
to his own individual experience. Pursuing that
line of thought, it began after a while to seem clear
to me that the infancy of the animal in a very undeveloped
condition, with the larger part of his faculties in
potentiality rather than in actuality, was a direct
result of the increase of intelligence, and I began
to see that now we have two steps: first, natural
selection goes on increasing the intelligence; and
secondly, when the intelligence goes far enough, it
makes a longer infancy, a creature is born less developed,
and therefore there comes this plastic period during
which he is more teachable. The capacity for
progress begins to come in, and you begin to get at
one of the great points in which man is distinguished
from the lower animals, for one of those points is
undoubtedly his progressiveness; and I think that any
one will say, with very little hesitation, that if
it were not for our period of infancy we should not
be progressive. If we came into the world with
our capacities all cut and dried, one generation would
be very much like another.