Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political societyBagehot, Walter
Philosophy
Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society
Bagehot, Walter
Evolution; Nationalism; Political science
'The possibility of all education (of which military drill is only one
particular form) is based upon, the existence of this power which the
nervous system possesses, of organising conscious actions into more or
less unconscious, or reflex, operations. It may be laid down as a rule,
that if any two mental states be called up together, or in succession,
with due frequency and vividness, the subsequent production of the one
of them will suffice to call up the other, and that whether we desire
it or not.'[1]
[1] Huxley's Elementary Physiology, pp. 284-286.
The body of the accomplished man has thus become by training different
from what it once was, and different from that of the rude man; it is
charged with stored virtue and acquired faculty which come away from it
unconsciously.
Again, as to race, another authority teaches:--'Man's life truly
represents a progressive development of the nervous system, none the
less so because it takes place out of the womb instead of in it. The
regular transmutation of motions which are at first voluntary into
secondary automatic motions, as Hartley calls them, is due to a
gradually effected organisation; and we may rest assured of this, that
co-ordinate activity always testifies to stored-up power, either innate
or acquired.
'The way in which an acquired faculty of the parent animal is sometimes
distinctly transmitted to the progeny as a heritage, instinct, or
innate endowment, furnishes a striking confirmation of the foregoing
observations. Power that has been laboriously acquired and stored up as
statical in one generation manifestly in such case becomes the inborn
faculty of the next; and the development takes place in accordance with
that law of increasing speciality and complexity of adaptation to
external nature which is traceable through the animal kingdom; or, in
other words, that law, of progress from the general to the special in
development which the appearance of nerve force amongst natural forces
and the complexity of the nervous system of man both illustrate. As the
vital force gathers up, as it were, into itself inferior forces, and
might be said to be a development of them, or, as in the appearance of
nerve force, simpler and more general forces are gathered up and
concentrated in a more special and complex mode of energy; so again a
further specialisation takes place in the development of the nervous
system, whether watched through generations or through individual life.
It is not by limiting our observations to the life of the individual,
however, who is but a link in the chain of organic beings connecting
the past with the future, that we shall come at the full truth; the
present individual is the inevitable consequence of his antecedents in
the past, and in the examination of these alone do we arrive at the
adequate explanation of him. It behoves us, then, having found any
faculty to be innate, not to rest content there, but steadily to follow
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