Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/184

170 B. BOSANQUET: the work of vision, and the dog, after the same operation, may recover his sight. 1 It is not, perhaps, altogether fanciful to trace a transfor- mation of this kind in the world of volition. It is often maintained that the simple and sensuous conditions which, as stimuli to actions, determine the life of primitive societies, and differentiate the hunter from the shepherd, and the shepherd from the tiller of the soil, continue to be the essen- tial determinants of action the true causal factors of the moral world throughout the life of higher societies. But development follows a subtler course than this, and the unity of miud is more thorough than such a doctrine admits. The simplest life-maintaining activities of civilised man are con- ditioned by far-reaching ideas, and if the capacity for these ideas perishes, the simpler stimuli which might have sufficed in an earlier phase are unable to carry out the task of pro- viding for existence. The maintenance of material conditions- has been transferred to the higher moral powers the co- operative qualities demanded by a complex society. But by this transference the simple impulses of love and hunger have become unable to govern the world, as once, perhaps, they did. An objection may be made to the precise nerve of the analogy, on the ground that it is one thing to say that a simple impulse is inadequate to a more complex problem, and another to say that the simple impulse has lost even the power which it previously possessed. But tbe two cases are not really separable. The transference has taken place because the work to be done came to be beyond the reach of the lower capacity ; and the disabling reaction upon the lower capacity itself is a matter of degree, and is always in such cases more or less evident. It would be easy to show that the motor effectiveness of the simpler impulses has been greatly im- paired by the transference of their function to completer forms of volition. The phenomena of stationary populations are a case in point. 3. I may now say something of the antithesis of Imitation and Invention, which, under the form of Habit and Accom- modation is alleged to permeate man's social being. It is clear that in analysing the mind or minds of men in society, with reference to their social character, we have to deal at once with phenomena of identity and with phenomena of difference. The minds which form the mind of a given community have certain features in common as unquestion- ably as they have certain features which are individual. And 1 See Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race, p. 20 if.