becomes once more laborious. With the displacement of the instinct, corresponding dislocations result, though with extreme slowness, in the organ with which it is connected. Thus nursing was perhaps an acquired faculty, which became “natural.” It has now become so difficult that among the upper classes the majority, even with the best will, can scarcely perform this function for a couple of months, or perhaps not at all. Science is already enquiring into the possibility of the disappearance of the mammary glands and with them of the peculiar character of woman’s breast. It is often only the future that can decide what is progress and what degeneration. But certainly nothing can be more unscientific than to dismiss all anxiety about the future with the dogma: that the will to live in offspring is so strong that only the degenerate do not possess it, and that with a healthy woman nothing can injure the motherly instinct. To a thinker of the evolutionist school, everything is subject to possible transformation, and nowhere is there anything at work which can “make no difference.” There is not a brain, not a nervous system which can evade even the involuntary impressions of the street. These sink into the subconscious soul and thence may arise again after many years. Not one person is the same—or will ever be the same,—when, for instance, he comes away from a lecture, as he was when he went to it. Some psychic waves have always been set in motion and this motion is continued to infinity. If this is even true of a notice on a shop-front, or of a momentary feeling of anger or joy, how much more then must it be so of the impressions which dominate our days and years. Our conceptions are forged from the true or false metal of our moods and become in turn the implements by which the bronze or gold of moods is wrought. All sanctity, all self-culture rest upon man’s power of diverting certain thoughts, suppressing certain conceptions, turning aside certain impulses of the will; of introducing other thoughts, intensifying other conceptions, encouraging other impulses; in other words, partly utilising and partly rejecting certain states of mind. In this way, bad habits arise from one class of moods, good habits from another. When these have acquired sufficient strength, new modes of action, new plans of life gradually become “natural”; new instincts are formed, in which willingness and reluctance often stand in an opposite relation to that they occupied at the commencement of the process. Sensuousness and soul are thus both the creations of development, and it is the voluptuousness of many thousands of years that stirs in the mother when she feels her child’s lips at her breast; it is the tenderness of as many ages which bends in the shape of every new mother over her child’s cot.