In the brute creation this element of progress is wanting. The bird builds its nest, the bee its cell, the beaver its dam, with no more skill or elaboration to-day, than did the bird or bee or beaver primeval. The instinct of animals does not with time become intellect; their comforts do not increase, their sphere of action does not enlarge. By domestication, stocks may be improved, but nowhere do we see animals uniting for mutual improvement, or creating for themselves an artificial existence. So in man, whose nature comprises both the animal and the intellectual, the physical organism neither perceptibly advances nor deteriorates. The features may, indeed, beam brighter from the light of a purer intellectuality cast upon them from within, but the hand, the eye, the heart, so far as we know, is no more perfect now than in the days of Adam. As viewed by Mr Bagehot, the body of the accomplished man "becomes, by training, different from what it once was, and different from that of the rude man, becomes charged with stored virtue and acquired faculty which come away from it unconsciously." But the body of the accomplished man dies, and the son can in no wise inherit it, whereas the soul of his accomplishments does not die, but lives in the air, and becomes part of the vital breath of society. And, again, "power that has been laboriously acquired and stored up as statical in one generation" sometimes, says Maudsley, "becomes the inborn faculty of the next; and the development takes place in accordance with that law of increasing speciality and complexity of adaption 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." On the other side John Stuart Mill is just as positive that culture is not inherent. "Of all vulgar modes," he remarks, "of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences;" and, says Mr Buckle, "we cannot safely assume that there has been any permanent improvement in the moral or intellectual faculties of man, nor have we any decisive ground for saying that those faculties are likely to be greater in an infant born in the most civilized part of Europe, than in one born in the wildest region of a barbarous country."