EXPERIENCE AND INTUITIONS 239

In short, Spencer maintained that intellectual and moral
intuitions had arisen from gradually organised and
inherited experience. "What the transcendentalist
called a priori principles the evolutionist regards as
a priori indeed to the individual, but a posteriori to
the race; that is as race experiences which in the
individual appear as intuitions/51

This was an ingenious eirenicon, but it does not
seem to satisfy all the philosophers, those namely who
feel that intuitions—both intellectual and moral—have
a validity, universality, and compelling necessity which
cannot be accounted for if they are simply the outcome
of race-experience. The only alternative seems to be
to say that their validity depends on the nature of mind
itself, or, what comes to the same thing, because they
are in harmony with the spiritual principle in nature.

Nor are the biologists quite satisfied with Spencer's
reconciliation, between empiricism and apriorism, for,
in the form he gave it, there is the tacit assumption
that results of experience are as such transmissible.
But this is biologically a hazardous assumption. The
only alternative would be to suppose that the advance
to rational intuitions came about by the selection of
variations towards that type of mental constitution
which rational and moral intuitions express—a
probably very slow process which would be sheltered
by the individual moulding himself to the social
heritage in which many results of experience are
registered and entailed independently of any germ-
plasm. It is possible that there has been an under-
estimate of the extent to which what are regarded.as

1 W. H. Hudson, Introduction to the Philosophy of Herbert
Spencer,f the human race, have been