landscape, by reason of his limited intellectual power. We know that (in spite of common opinion) a savage, even a barbarian, is not moved by the splendours of civilised life, but only by its petty and puerile sides. Its greater aspects inspire him neither with desire, admiration, nor jealousy, because he does not understand them. Bougainville, in the last century, had already remarked this fact, which has frequently been confirmed since. Speaking of the profound indifference of the Pacific Islanders to the skilled construction of his ships and the instruments belonging to them, he says, “They treat the masterpieces of human industry as laws and phenomena of nature.” 2. Must we admit heredity as a special and independent cause of emotional evolution? This problem has been hotly debated. Darwin, Spencer, and many others following them, admit that certain acquired variations or modifications in the range of the feelings may be hereditarily transmitted, then fixed and organised in a race. They give as examples, fear, the benevolent feelings, the love of nature, the musical sense, etc.; the sudden return of so-called civilised individuals to savage or nomad life, for want of a hereditary tendency fixed by the habit of several generations; while the co-existence of predatory tendencies with the highest culture is for them a case of atavism or reversion.[124] On the other hand, the dominant opinion for the last twenty years (I think it shows symptoms of declining) is radically opposed to the inheritance of acquired modifications. Weismann and Wallace, who, more than others, have touched on the psychological parts of this subject, are decidedly for the negative. The question is therefore an open one, and I accept it as such, in order to escape the accusation of a bias in favour of heredity. But even while admitting that there is no fact strictly conclusive in favour of the transmission of psychic peculiarities, it nevertheless remains true that some occurrences of this sort are probable enough, especially in the pathological order. These belong to the category of appetites, tendencies, and passions, much more than to the group of intellectual states. This might have been foreseen, physiological heredity being more stable than psychological, and physiological conditions affecting the emotional life much more immediately than the intellectual. ----- Footnote 124: For further details, see my _Hérédité psychologique_, Bk. I. chap. v. and Bk. III. chap. iii. Bain has discussed the question at great length from the strictly psychological point of view (_The Emotions_, chap. ii.). He inclines to a “probability” of transmission in certain cases. -----