=The two kinds of progress.=--Now in the case of all species other than man, the only possible progress is this racial or inherent progress, dependent upon a choice or selection of parents, and comparable in some measure, as Darwin showed, with the change similarly produced in the selective breeding or “artificial selection” of the lower animals by man. But in the case of man himself, there is a wholly different kind of progress also attainable, which is not inherent or racial progress at all, but yet is real progress: and which has the most important relations to the inherent or racial progress that might be achieved by the process of natural selection, or the choice of parents. It has been laid down that acquired characters are not transmissible by heredity: but man has learnt--and it is well for him--to circumvent the laws of heredity by transmitting his spiritual acquirements through language and art. Even before writing there was tradition, passed on from mouth to mouth. As long as man was without writing he advanced little faster than other creatures, we may surmise: we know that he has an undistinguished past of probably at least six million years: but with speech _and writing_ came the transmission of acquirements in this special sense; not that the past education of a mother will enlarge her baby's brain, but that she can teach her daughter what she has learnt, and so the child can begin where the parent left off, just as Lamarck wrongly imagined to be the case with the young giraffe, that he supposed to profit by the stretching of the parental necks. It is this transmission of spiritual acquirements--outside the germ-plasm and in defiance of its laws--that explains the amazing advance of man in the last ten or twenty thousand years as compared with the almost speechless ages before them. This kind of progress is peculiar to man,[78] it is the gift of intelligence, and we may call it traditional or acquired progress. It is an utterly different thing from inherent or racial progress, an improvement in the breed dependent upon the happy choice of parents. And it is surely evident, on a moment's consideration, that acquired progress is compatible with inherent decadence. To use Coleridge's image, a dwarf may see further than a giant if he sits on the giant's shoulders: yet he is a dwarf and the other a giant. Any schoolboy now knows more than Aristotle, and that is true progress of a kind, but the schoolboy may well be a dwarf compared with Aristotle, and may belong to a race degenerate when compared with his; _and that is inherent or racial decadence subsisting with acquired or traditional progress_.