Chapter 28 Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience.

In this final chapter I shall treat of what has sometimes been called psychogenesis, and try to ascertain¹ just how far the connections of things in the outward environment can account for our tendency to think of, and to react upon, certain things in certain ways and in no others, even though personally we have had of the things in question no experience, or almost no experience, at all. It is a familiar truth that some propositions are necessary. We must attach the predicate 'equal' to the subject 'opposite sides of a parallelogram' if we think those terms together at all, whereas we need not in any such way attach the predicate 'rainy,' for example, to the subject 'to-morrow.' The dubious³ sort of coupling of terms is universally admitted to be due to 'experience'; the certain sort is ascribed to the 'organic structure' of the mind. This structure is in turn supposed by the so-called apriorists to be of transcendental origin, or at any rate not to be explicable by experience; whilst by evolutionary⁶ empiricists it is supposed to be also due to experience, only not to the experience of the individual, but to that of his ancestors as far back as one may please to go. Our emotional and instinctive⁷ tendencies, our irresistible⁸ impulses to couple certain movements with the perception or thought of certain things, are also features of our connate mental structure, and like the necessary judgments¹⁰, are interpreted by the apriorists and the empiricists in the same warring ways.

I shall try in the course of the chapter to make plain three things:

1) That, taking the word experience as it is universally understood, the experience of the race can no more account for our necessary or a priori judgments than the experience of the individual can;

2) That there is no good evidence for the belief that our instinctive reactions are fruits of our ancestors' education in the midst of the same environment, transmitted to us at birth.

3) That the features of our organic mental structure cannot be explained at all by our conscious intercourse¹³ with the outer environment, but must rather be understood as congenital variations, 'accidental'1 in the first instance, but then transmitted as fixed¹⁴ features of the race.

On the whole, then, the account which the apriorists give of the facts is that which I defend; although I should contend (as will hereafter appear) for a naturalistic view of their cause.

The first thing I have to say is that all schools (however they otherwise differ) must allow that the elementary qualities of cold, heat, pleasure, pain, red, blue, sound, silence, etc., are original, innate¹⁵, or a priori properties of our subjective¹⁶ nature, even though they should require the touch of experience to waken them into actual consciousness, and should slumber¹⁷, to all eternity¹⁸, without it.

This is so on either of the two hypotheses we may make concerning the relation of the feelings to the realities at whose touch they become alive. For in the first place, if a feeling do not mirror the reality which wakens it and to which we say it corresponds, if it mirror no reality whatever outside of the mind, it of course is a purely¹⁹ mental product. By its very definition it can be nothing else. But in the second place, even if it do mirror the reality exactly, still it is not that reality itself, it is a duplication of it, the result of a mental reaction. And that the mind should have the power of reacting in just that duplicate way can only be stated as a harmony between its nature and the nature of the truth outside of it, a harmony whereby it follows that the qualities of both parties match.

The originality²¹ of these elements is not, then, a question for dispute. The warfare²² of philosophers is exclusively relative to their FORMS OF COMBINATION. The empiricist maintains that these forms can only follow the order of combination in which the elements were originally awakened²³ by the impressions of the external world; the apriorists insist, on the contrary, that some modes of combination, at any rate, follow from the natures of the elements themselves, and that no amount of experience can modify this result.
What is Meant by Experience?

The phrase 'organic mental structure' names the matter in dispute. Has the mind such a structure or not? Are its contents arranged from the start, or is the arrangement they may possess simply due to the shuffling²⁵ of them by experience in an absolutely plastic bed? Now the first thing to make sure of is that when we talk of 'experience,' we attach a definite meaning to the word. Experience means experience of something foreign supposed to impress us, whether spontaneously or in consequence of our own exertions²⁶ and acts. Impressions, as we well know, affect certain orders of sequence and coexistence, and the mind's habits copy the habits of the impressions, so that our images of things assume a time- and space-arrangement which resembles the time- and space-arrangements outside. To uniform outer coexistences and sequences correspond constant conjunctions of ideas, to fortuitous coexistences and sequences casual conjunctions of ideas. We are sure that fire will burn and water wet us, less sure that thunder will come after lightning, not at all sure whether a strange dog will bark at us or let us go by. In these ways experience moulds us every hour, and makes of our minds a mirror of the time- and space-connections between the things in the world. The principle of habit within us so fixes the copy at last that we find it difficult even to imagine how the outward order could possibly be different from what it is, and we continually divine from the present what the future is to be. These habits of transition, from one thought to another, are features of mental structure which were lacking in us at birth; we can see their growth under experience's moulding finger, and we can see how often experience undoes²⁷ her own work, and for an earlier order substitutes a new one. 'The order of experience,' in this matter of the time- and space-conjunctions of things, is thus an indisputably vera causa of our forms of thought. It is our educator, our sovereign helper and friend; and its name, standing²⁸ for something with so real and definite a use, ought to be kept sacred and encumbered²⁹ with no vaguer meaning.

If all the connections among ideas in the mind could be interpreted as so many combinations of sense-data wrought³⁰ into fixity in this way from without, then experience in the common and legitimate³¹ sense of the word would be the sole fashioner of the mind.

The empirical school in psychology³² has in the main contended that they can be so interpreted. Before our generation, it was the experience of the individual only which was meant. But when one nowadays says that the human mind owes its present shape to experience, he means the experience of ancestors as well. Mr. Spencer's statement of this is the earliest emphatic³³ one, and deserves quotation³⁴ in full:2

"The supposition that the inner cohesions are adjusted to the outer persistences³⁷ by accumulated experience of those outer persistences is in harmony with all our actual knowledge of mental phenomena³⁸. Though in so far as reflex actions and instincts are concerned, the experience-hypothesis seems insufficient³⁹; yet its seeming insufficiency occurs only where the evidence is beyond our reach. Nay⁴⁰, even here such few facts as we can get point to the conclusion that automatic psychical⁴² connections result from the registration⁴³ of experiences continued for numberless generations.

"In brief, the case stands thus: It is agreed that all psychical relations, save the absolutely indissoluble, are determined⁴⁴ by experiences. Their various strengths are admitted, other things equal, to be proportionate to the multiplication⁴⁵ of experiences. It is an unavoidable corollary that an infinity⁴⁶ of experiences will produce a. psychical relation that is indissoluble. Though such infinity of experiences cannot be received by a single individual, yet it may be received by the succession of individuals forming a race. And if there is a transmission of induced tendencies in the nervous system, it is inferrible that all psychical relations whatever, from the necessary to the fortuitous, result from the experiences of the corresponding external relations; and are so brought into harmony with them.

"Thus, the experience-hypothesis furnishes an adequate solution. The genesis of instinct, the development of memory and reason out of it, and the consolidation⁴⁷ of rational actions and inferences into instinctive ones, are alike explicable on the single principle that the cohesion³⁵ between psychical states is proportionate to the frequency with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has been repeated in experience.

"The universal law that, other things equal, the cohesion of psychical states is proportionate to the frequency with which they have followed one another in experience, supplies an explanation of the so-called 'forms of thought,' as soon as it is supplemented by the law that habitual⁴⁸ psychical successions entail⁴⁹ some hereditary⁵⁰ tendency to such successions, which, under persistent⁵¹ conditions, will become cumulative⁵² in generation after generation. We saw that the establishment of those compound reflex actions called instincts is comprehensible on the principle that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, organized into correspondence with outer relations. We have now to observe that the establishment of those consolidated⁵³, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations constituting our ideas of Space and Time is comprehensible on the same principle. For if even to external relations that are often experienced during the life of a single organism, answering internal relations are established that become next to automatic -- if such a combination of psychical changes as that which guides a savage⁵⁴ in hitting a bird with an arrow becomes, by constant repetition, so organized as to be performed almost without thought of the processes of adjustment gone through -- and if skill of this kind is so far transmissible that particular races of men become characterized by particular aptitudes⁵⁵, which are nothing else than partially-organized psychical connections; then, if there exist certain external relations which are experienced by all organisms at all instants of their waking lives -- relations which are absolutely constant, absolutely universal -- there will be established answering internal relations that are absolutely constant, absolutely universal. Such relations we have in those of Space and Time. The organization of subjective relations adjusted to these objective relations has been cumulative, not in each race of creatures only, but throughout successive races of creatures; and such subjective relations have, therefore, become more consolidated than all others. Being experienced in every perception and every action of each creature, these connections among outer existences must, for this reason too, be responded to by connections among inner feelings, that are, above all others, indissoluble. As the substrata of all other relations in the non-ego⁵⁶, they must be responded to by conceptions that are the substrata of all other relations in the ego. Being the constant and infinitely-repeated elements of thought, they must become the automatic elements of thought -- the elements of thought which it is impossible to get rid of -- the 'forms of intuition.'

"Such, it seems to me, is the only possible reconciliation⁵⁷ between the experience-hypothesis and the hypothesis of the transcendentalists; neither of which is tenable by itself. Insurmountable difficulties are presented by the Kantian doctrine⁵⁸ (as we shall, hereafter see); and the antagonist⁵⁹ doctrine, taken alone, presents difficulties that are equally insurmountable. To rest with the unqualified assertion that, antecedent to experience, the mind is a blank, is to ignore the questions -- whence comes the power of organizing experiences? whence arise the different degrees of that power possessed⁶⁰ by different races of organisms, and different individuals of the same race? If, at birth, there exists nothing but a passive receptivity of impressions, why is not a horse as educable as a man? Should it be said that language makes the difference, then why do not the cat and the dog, reared in the same house-hold, arrive at equal degrees and kinds of intelligence? Understood in its current form, the experience-hypothesis implies that the presence of a definitely-organized nervous system is a circumstance of no moment -- a fact not needing to be taken into account! Yet it is the all-important fact -- the fact to which, in one sense, the criticisms of Leibnitz and others pointed⁶¹ -- the fact without which an assimilation of experiences is inexplicable⁶². Throughout the animal kingdom in general, the actions are dependent on the nervous structure. The physiologist⁶³ shows us that each reflex movement implies the agency of certain nerves and ganglia; that a development of complicated instincts is accompanied by complication of the nervous centres and their commissural connections; that the same creature in different stages, as larva and imago for example, changes its instincts as its nervous structure changes; and that as we advance to creatures of high intelligence, a vast increase ill the size and in the complexity⁶⁴ of the nervous system takes place. What is the obvious inference? It is that the ability to co-ordinate impressions and to perform the appropriate actions always implies the pre-existence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way. What is the meaning of the human brain? It is that the many established relations among its parts stand for so many established relations among the psychical changes. Each of the constant connections among the fibres of the cerebral⁶⁵ masses answers to some constant connection of phenomena in the experiences of the race. Just as the organized arrangement subsisting⁶⁶ between the sensory⁶⁷ nerves of the nostrils⁶⁸ and the motor nerves of the respiratory muscles not only makes possible a sneeze, but also, in the newly-born infant, implies sneezings to be hereafter performed; so, all the organized arrangements subsisting among the nerves of the infant's brain not only make possible certain combinations of impressions, but also imply that such combinations will hereafter be made -- imply that there are answering combinations in the outer world -- imply a preparedness to cognize these combinations -- imply faculties⁶⁹ of comprehending them. It is true that the resulting compound psychical changes do not take place with the same readiness and automatic precision as the simple reflex action instanced -- it is true that some individual experiences seem required to establish them. But while this is partly due to the fact that these combinations are highly involved, extremely varied⁷⁰ in their modes of occurrence, made up therefore of psychical relations less completely coherent, and hence need further repetitions to perfect them; it is in a much greater degree due to the fact that at birth the organization of the brain is incomplete, and does not cease its spontaneous progress for twenty or thirty years afterwards. Those who contend that knowledge results wholly from the experiences of the individual, ignoring as they do the mental evolution which accompanies the autogenous development of the nervous system, fall into an error as great as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and structure to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to assume the adult form. Were the infant born with a full-sized and completely-constructed brain, their position would be less untenable. But, as the case stands, the gradually-increasing intelligence displayed throughout childhood and youth is more attributable to the completion of the cerebral organization than to the individual experiences -- a truth proved by the fact that in adult life there is sometimes displayed a high endowment of some faculty⁷² which, during education, was never brought into play. Doubtless, experiences received by the individual furnish the concrete materials for all thought. Doubtless, the organized and semi-organized arrangements existing among the cerebral nerves can give no knowledge until there has been a presentation of the external relations to which they correspond. And doubtless the child's daily observations and reasonings aid the formation of those involved nervous connections that are in process of spontaneous evolution; just as its daily gambols⁷³ aid the development of its limbs. But saying this is quite a different thing from saying that its intelligence is wholly produced by its experiences. That is an utterly⁷⁴ inadmissible doctrine -- a doctrine which makes the presence of a brain meaningless -- a doctrine which makes idiotcy [sic] unaccountable.

"In the sense, then, that there exist in the nervous system certain pre-established relations answering to relations in the environment, there is truth in the doctrine of 'forms of intuition' -- not the truth which its defenders⁷⁶ suppose, but a parallel truth. Corresponding to absolute external relations, there are established in the structure of the nervous system absolute internal relations -- relations that are potentially present before birth in the shape of definite nervous connections; that are antecedent to, and independent of, individual experiences; and that are automatically disclosed along with the first cognitions. And, as here understood, it is not only these fundamental relations which are thus predetermined, but also hosts of other relations of a more or less constant kind, which are congenitally represented by more or less complete nervous connections. But these predetermined internal relations, though independent of the experiences of the individual, are not independent of experiences in general: they have been determined by the experiences of preceding organisms. The corollary here drawn⁷⁷ from the general argument is that the human brain is an organized register of infinitely-numerous experiences received during the evolution of life, or rather during the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human organism has been reached. The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been successively bequeathed, principal and interest; and have slowly amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant -- which the infant in after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further complicates⁷⁸ -- and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations. And thus it happens that the European inherits from twenty to thirty cubic inches more brain than the Papuan. Thus it happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in some inferior human races, become congenital in superior ones. Thus it happens that out of savages⁷⁹ unable to count up to the number of their fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs, arise at length our Newtons and Shakspeares."

This is a brilliant and seductive statement, and it doubtless includes a good deal of truth. Unfortunately it fails to go into details; and when the details are scrutinized⁸⁰, as they soon must be by us, many of them will be seen to be inexplicable in this simple way, and the choice will then remain to us either of denying the experiential origin of certain of our judgments, or of enlarging the meaning of the word experience so as to include these cases among its effects.
Two Modes of Origin of Brain Structure.

If we adopt the former course we meet with a controversial difficulty. The 'experience-philosophy' has from time immemorial been the opponent of theological modes of thought. The word experience has a halo of anti-super-naturalism about it; so that if anyone express dissatisfaction with any function claimed for it, he is liable to be treated as if he could only be animated⁸² by loyalty⁸³ to the catechism, or in some way have the interests of obscurantism at heart. I am entirely⁸⁴ certain that, on this ground alone, what I have ereloing [sic] to say will make this a sealed chapter to many of my readers. "He denies experience!" they will exclaim, "denies science; believes the mind created by miracle; is a regular old partisan⁸⁵ of innate ideas! That is enough! we'll listen to such antediluvian⁸⁶ twaddle no more." Regrettable as is the loss of readers capable of such wholesale⁸⁷ discipleship⁸⁸, I feel that a definite meaning for the word experience is even more important than their company. 'Experience' does not mean every natural, as opposed to every supernatural, cause. It means a particular sort of natural agency, alongside of which other more recondite⁸⁹ natural agencies may perfectly⁹⁰ well exist. With the scientific animus⁹¹ of anti-supernaturalism we ought to agree, but we ought to free ourselves from its verbal idols⁹² and bugbears.

Nature has many methods of producing the same effect. She may make a 'born' draughtsman or singer by tipping in a certain direction at an opportune⁹³ moment the molecules⁹⁶ of some human ovum; or she may bring forth⁹⁷ a child ungifted and make him spend laborious⁹⁸ but successful years at school. She may make our ears ring by the sound of a bell, or by a dose of quinine; make us see yellow by spreading a field of buttercups before our eyes, or by mixing a little santonine powder with our food; fill us with terror of certain surroundings by making them really dangerous, or by a blow which produces a pathological alteration⁹⁹ of our brain. It is obvious that we need two words to designate these two modes of operating. In the one case the natural agents produce perceptions which take cognizance of the agents themselves; in the other case, they produce perceptions which take cognizance of something else. What is taught to the mind by the 'experience,' in the first case, is the order of the experience itself -- the 'inner relation' (in Spencer's phrase) 'corresponds' to the 'outer relation' which produced it, by remembering and knowing the latter. But in the case of the other sort of natural agency, what is taught to the mind has nothing to do with the agency itself, but with some different outer relation altogether. A diagram will express the Fig94 alternatives. B stands for our human

brain in the midst of the world. All the little o's with arrows proceeding¹⁰⁰ from them are natural objects (like sunsets, etc.), which impress it through the senses, and in the strict sense of the word give it experience, teaching it by habit and association what is the order of their ways. All the little x's inside the brain and all the little x's outside of it are other natural objects and processes (in the ovum, in the blood, etc.), which equally modify the brain, but mould it to no cognition of themselves. The tinnitus aurium discloses no properties of the quinine; the musical endowment teaches no embryology; the morbid¹⁰¹ dread¹⁰² (of solitude¹⁰³, perhaps) no brain-pathology; but the way in which a dirty sunset and a rainy morrow hang together in the mind copies and teaches the sequences of sunsets and rainfall in the outer world.

In zoological evolution we have two modes in which an animal race may grow to be a better match for its environment.

First, the so-called way of 'adaptation,' in which the environment may itself modify its inhabitant by exercising, hardening, and habituating him to certain sequences, and these habits may, it is often maintained, become hereditary.

Second, the way of 'accidental variation,' as Mr. Darwin termed it, in which certain young are born with peculiarities¹⁰⁴ that help them and their progeny¹⁰⁶ to survive. That variations of this sort tend to become hereditary, no one doubts.

The first mode is called by Mr. Spencer direct, the second indirect, equilibration. Both equilibrations must of course be natural and physical processes, but they belong to entirely different physical spheres. The direct influences are obvious and accessible things. The causes of variation in the young are, on the other hand, molecular¹⁰⁷ and hidden. The direct influences are the animal's 'experiences,' in the widest sense of the term. Where what is influenced by them is the mental organism, they are conscious experiences, and become the objects as well as the causes of their effects. That is, the effect consists in a tendency of the experience itself to be remembered, or to have its elements thereafter coupled in imagination just as they were coupled in the experience. In the diagram these experiences are represented by the o's exclusively. The x's, on the other hand, stand for the indirect causes of mental modification¹⁰⁸ -- causes of which we are not immediately conscious as such, and which are not the direct objects of the effects they produce. Some of them are molecular accidents before birth; some of them are collateral¹¹¹ and remote combinations, unintended combinations, one might say, of more direct effects wrought in the unstable¹¹² and intricate brain-tissue. Such a result is unquestionably the susceptibility to music, which some individuals possess at the present day. It has no zoological utility; it corresponds to no object in the natural environment; it is a pure incident of having a hearing organ, an incident depending on such instable and inessential conditions that one brother may have it and another brother not. Just so with the susceptibility to sea-sickness, which, so far from being engendered¹¹⁴ by long experience of its 'object' (if a heaving deck can be called its object) is erelong annulled¹¹⁶ thereby¹¹⁷. Our higher æsthetic, moral, and intellectual life seems made up of affections of this collateral and incidental sort, which have entered the mind by the back stairs, as it were, or rather have not entered the mind at all, but got surreptitiously born in the house. No one can successfully treat of psychogenesis, or the factors of mental evolution, without distinguishing between these two ways in which the mind is assailed¹¹⁸. The way of 'experience' proper is the front door, the door of the five senses. The agents which affect the brain in this way immediately become the mind's objects. The other agents do not. It would be simply silly to say of two men with perhaps equal effective skill in drawing, one an untaught natural genius, the other a mere¹¹⁹ obstinate¹²⁰ plodder¹²¹ in the studio, that both alike owe their skill to their 'experience.' The reasons of their several skills lie in wholly disparate natural cycles of causation.3

I will then, with the reader's permission, restrict the word 'experience' to processes which influence the mind by the front-door-way of simple habits and association. What the back-door-effects may be will probably grow clearer as we proceed; so I will pass right on to a scrutiny¹²² of the actual mental structure which we find.
The Genesis of the Elementary Mental Categories.

We find: 1. Elementary sorts of sensation, and feelings of personal activity;

2. Emotions; desires; instincts; ideas of worth; æsthetic ideas;

3. Ideas of time and space and number;

4. Ideas of difference and resemblance, and of their degrees.

5. Ideas of causal dependence¹²³ among events; of end and means; of subject and attribute.

6. Judgments affirming, denying, doubting, supposing any of the above ideas.

7. Judgments that the former judgments logically involve, exclude, or are indifferent to, each other.

Now we may postulate¹²⁴ at the outset that all these forms of thought have a natural origin, if we could only get at it. That assumption must be made at the outset of every scientific investigation¹²⁵, or there is no temptation to proceed. But the first account of their origin which we are likely to hit upon is a snare¹²⁶. All these mental affections are ways of knowing objects. Most psychologists nowadays believe that the objects first, in some natural way, engendered a brain from out of their midst, and then imprinted¹²⁷ these various cognitive¹²⁸ affections upon it. But how? The ordinary evolutionist answer to this question is exceedingly simple-minded. The idea of most speculators seems to be that, since it suffices now for us to become acquainted with a complex object, that it should be simply present to us often enough, so it must be fair to assume universally that, with time enough given, the mere presence of the various objects and relations to be known must end by bringing about the latter's cognition, and that in this way all mental structure was from first to last evolved. Any ordinary Spencerite will tell you that just as the experience of blue objects wrought into our mind the color blue, and hard objects got it to feel hardness, so the presence of large and small objects in the world gave it the notion of size, moving objects made it aware of motion, and objective successions taught it time. Similarly in a world with different impressing things, the mind had to acquire a sense of difference, whilst the like parts of the world as they fell upon it kindled¹²⁹ in it the perception of similarity. Outward sequences which sometimes held good, and sometimes failed, naturally engendered in it doubtful and uncertain forms of expectation, and ultimately gave rise to the disjunctive forms of judgment⁹; whilst the hypothetic form, 'if a, then b,' was sure to ensue from sequences that were invariable in the outer world. On this view, if the outer order suddenly were to change its elements and modes, we should have no faculties to cognize the new order by. At most we should feel a sort of frustration¹³⁰ and confusion. But little by little the new presence would work on us as the old one did; and in course of time another set of psychic⁴¹ categories would arise, fitted to take cognizance of the altered world.

This notion of the outer world inevitably¹³¹ building up a sort of mental duplicate of itself if we only give it time, is so easy and natural in its vagueness that one hardly knows how to start to criticise¹³² it. One thing, however, is obvious, namely that the manner in which we now become acquainted with complex objects need not in the least resemble the manner in which the original elements of our consciousness grew up. Now, it is true, a new sort of animal need only be present to me, to impress its image permanently¹³³ on my mind; but this is because I am already in possession of categories for knowing each and all of its several attributes, and of a memory for retracing¹³⁴ the order of their conjunction. I now have preformed categories for all possible objects. The objects need only awaken²⁴ these from their slumber. But it is a very different matter to account for the categories themselves. I think we must admit that the origin of the various elementary feelings is a recondite history, even after some sort of neural¹³⁵ tissue is there for the outer world to begin its work on. The mere existence of things to be known is even now not, as a rule, sufficient to bring about a knowledge of them. Our abstract and general discoveries usually come to us as lucky fancies; and it is only après coup⁴ that we find that they correspond to some reality. What immediately produced them were previous thoughts, with which, and with the brain-processes of which, that reality had naught¹³⁶ to do.

Why may it not have been so of the original elements of consciousness, sensation, time, space, resemblance, difference, and other relations? Why may they not have come into being by the back-door method, by such physical processes as lie more in the sphere of morphological accident, of inward summation¹³⁷ of effects, than in that of the 'sensible presence' of objects? Why may they not, in short, be pure idiosyncrasies, spontaneous variations, fitted by good luck (those of them which have survived) to take cognizance of objects (that is, to steer¹³⁸ us in our active dealings with them), without being in any intelligible¹⁴⁰ sense immediate¹⁰⁹ derivatives¹⁴¹ from them? I think we shall find this view gain more and more plausibility¹⁴² as we proceed.4

All these elements are subjective duplicates of outer objects. They are not the outer objects. The secondary qualities among them are not supposed by any educated person even to resemble the objects. Their nature depends more on the reacting brain than on the stimuli¹⁴³ which touch it off. This is even more palpably true of the natures of pleasure and pain, effort, desire and aversion, and of such feelings as those of cause and substance, of denial and of doubt. Here then is a native wealth of inner forms whose origin is shrouded¹⁴⁴ in mystery, and which at any rate were not simply 'impressed' from without, in any intelligible sense of the verb 'to impress.'

Their time- and space-relations, however, are impressed from without -- for two outer things at least the evolutionary psychologist must believe to resemble our thoughts of them, these are the time and space in which the objects lie. The time- and space-relations between things do stamp copies of themselves within. Things juxtaposed in space impress us, and continue to be thought, in the relation in which they exist there. Things sequent in time, ditto. And thus, through experience in the legitimate sense of the word, there can be truly explained an immense number of our mental habitudes, many of our abstract beliefs, and all our ideas of concrete things, and of their ways of behavior. Such truths as that fire burns and water wets, that glass refracts, heat melts snow, fishes live in water and die on land, and the like, form no small part of the most refined education, and are the all-in-all of education amongst the brutes¹⁴⁶ and lowest men. Here the mind is passive and tributary¹⁴⁷, a servile copy, fatally and unresistingly fashioned from without. It is the merit of the associationist school to have seen the wide scope of these effects of neighborhood in time and space; and their exaggerated applications of the principle of mere neighborhood ought not to blind us to the excellent service it has done to Psychology in their hands. As far as a large part of our thinking goes, then, it can intelligibly¹⁴⁸ be formulated¹⁴⁹ as a mere lot of habits impressed upon us from without. The degree of cohesion of our inner relations, is, in this part of our thinking, proportionate, in Mr. Spencer's phrase, to the degree of cohesion of the outer relations; the causes and the objects of our thought are one; and we are, in so far forth, what the materialistic¹⁵⁰ evolutionists would have us altogether, mere offshoots and creatures of our environment, and naught besides.5

But now the plot thickens, for the images impressed upon our memory by the outer stimuli are not restricted to the mere time- and space-relations, in which they originally came, but revive in various manners (dependent on the intricacy of the brain-paths and the instability of the tissue thereof), and form secondary combinations such as the forms of judgment, which, taken per se, are not congruent either with the forms in which reality exists or in those in which experiences befall us, but which may nevertheless be explained by the way in which experiences befall in a mind gifted with memory, expectation, and the possibility of feeling doubt, curiosity, belief, and denial. The conjunctions of experience befall more or less invariably, variably, or never. The idea of one term will then engender¹¹³ a fixed, a wavering, or a negative expectation of another, giving affirmative, the hypothetical, disjunctive, interrogative, and negative judgments, and judgments of actuality and possibility about certain things. The separation of attribute from subject in all judgments (which violates the way in which nature exists) may be similarly explained by the piecemeal¹⁵¹ order in which our perceptions come to us, a, vague nucleus¹⁵² growing gradually more detailed¹⁵³ as we attend to it more and more. These particular secondary mental forms have had ample justice done them by associationists from Hume downwards¹⁵⁴.

Associationists have also sought to account for discrimination, abstraction, and generalization¹⁵⁵ by the rates of frequency in which attributes come to us conjoined. With much less success, I think. In the chapter on Discrimination, I have, under the "law of dissociation by varying concomitants," sought to explain as much as possible by the passive order of experience. But the reader saw how much was left for active interest and unknown forces to do. In the chapter on Imagination I have similarly striven to do justice to the 'blended image' theory of generalization and abstraction. So I need say no more of these matters here.
The Genesis of the Natural Sciences.

Our 'scientific' ways of thinking the outer reality are highly abstract ways. The essence of things for science is not to be what they seem, but to be atoms and molecules moving to and from each other according to strange laws. Nowhere does the account of inner relations produced by outer ones in proportion to the frequency with which the latter have been met, more egregiously¹⁵⁶ break down than in the case of scientific conceptions. The order of scientific thought is quite incongruent either with the way in which reality exists or with the way in which it comes before us. Scientific thought goes by selection and emphasis exclusively. We break the solid plenitude of fact into separate essences, conceive generally what only exists particularly, and by our classifications leave nothing in its natural neighborhood, but separate the contiguous, and join what the poles divorce. The reality exists as a plenum. All its parts are contemporaneous, each is as real as any other, and each as essential for making the whole just what it is and nothing else. But we can neither experience nor think this plenum. What we experience, what comes before us, is a chaos¹⁵⁷ of fragmentary impressions interrupting each other;6 what we think is an abstract system of hypothetical data and laws.7

This sort of scientific algebra¹⁵⁸, little as it immediately resembles the reality given to us, turns out (strangely enough) applicable to it. That is, it yields expressions which, at given places and times, can be translated into real values, or interpreted as definite portions of the chaos that falls upon our sense. It becomes thus a practical guide to our expectations as well as a theoretic delight. But I do not see how any one with a sense for the facts can possibly call our systems immediate results of 'experience' in the ordinary sense. Every scientific conception is in the first instance a 'spontaneous variation' in some one's brain.8 For one that proves useful and applicable there are a thousand that perish through their worthlessness. Their genesis is strictly¹⁵⁹ akin¹¹ to that of the flashes of poetry and sallies of wit to which the instable brain-paths equally give rise. But whereas the poetry and wit (like the science of the ancients) are their 'own excuse for being,' and have to run the gauntlet of no farther test, the 'scientific' conceptions must prove their worth by being 'verified.' This test, however, is the cause of their preservation¹⁶⁰, not that of their production; and one might as well account for the origin of Artemus Ward's jokes by the 'cohesion' of subjects with predicates in proportion to the 'persistence³⁶ of the outer relations' to which they 'correspond' as to treat the genesis of scientific conceptions in the same ponderously¹⁶¹ unreal way.

The most persistent outer relations which science believes in are never matters of experience at all, but have to be disengaged from under experience by a process of elimination¹⁶², that is, by ignoring conditions which are always present. The elementary laws of mechanics, physics, and chemistry are all of this sort. The principle of uniformity in nature is of this sort; it has to be sought under and in spite of the most rebellious¹⁶³ appearances; and our conviction of its truth is far more like a religious faith than like assent¹⁶⁴ to a demonstration¹⁶⁵. The only cohesions which experience in the literal sense of the word produces in our mind are, as we contended some time back, the proximate laws of nature, and habitudes of concrete things, that heat melts ice, that salt preserves meat, that fish die out of water, and the like.9 Such 'empirical truths' as these we admitted to form an enormous part of human wisdom. The 'scientific' truths have to harmonize with these truths, or be given up as useless; but they arise in the mind in no such passive associative way as that in which the simpler truths arise. Even those experiences which are used to prove a scientific truth are for the most part artificial experiences of the laboratory gained after the truth itself has been conjectured¹⁶⁶. Instead of experiences engendering¹⁶⁷ the 'inner relations,' the inner relations are what engender the experiences here.

What happens in the brain after experience has done its utmost is what happens in every material mass which has been fashioned by an outward force, -- in every pudding or mortar¹⁶⁸, for example, which I may make with my hands. The fashioning from without brings the elements into collocations which set new internal forces free to exert their effects in turn. And the random¹⁶⁹ irradiations and resettlements of our ideas, which supervene upon experience, and constitute our free mental play, are due entirely to these secondary internal processes, which vary enormously from brain to brain, even though the brains be exposed to exactly the same 'outer relations.' The higher thought-processes owe their being to causes which correspond far more to the sourings and fermentations of dough¹⁷⁰, the setting of mortar, or the subsidence of sediments¹⁷¹ in mixtures, than to the manipulations by which these physical aggregates¹⁷² came to be compounded. Our study of similar association and reasoning taught us that the whole superiority of man depended on the facility with which in his brain the paths worn by the most frequent outer cohesions could be ruptured¹⁷³. The causes of the instability, the reasons why now this point and now that become in him the seat of rupture¹⁷⁴, we saw to be entirely obscure. (Vol. I. p. 580; Vol. II. p. 364.) The only clear thing about the peculiarity¹⁷⁵ seems to be its interstitial character, and the certainty that no mere appeal to man's 'experience' suffices to explain it.

When we pass from scientific to æsthetic and ethical¹⁷⁶ systems, every one readily admits that, although the elements are matters of experience, the peculiar¹⁰⁵ forms of relation into which they are woven are incongruent with the order of passively received experience. The world of æsthetics and ethics¹⁷⁷ is an ideal world, a Utopia, a world which the outer relations persist in contradicting, but which we as stubbornly persist in striving to make actual. Why do we thus invincibly¹⁷⁸ crave¹⁷⁹ to alter the given order of nature? Simply because other relations among things are far more interesting to us and more charming than the mere rates of frequency of their time- and space-conjunctions. These other relations are all secondary and brain-born, 'spontaneous variations' most of them, of our sensibility, whereby certain elements of experience, and certain arrangements in time and space, have acquired an agreeableness which otherwise would not have been felt. It is true that habitual arrangements may also become agreeable. But this agreeableness of the merely habitual is felt to be a mere ape and counterfeit¹⁸⁰ of real inward fitness; and one sign of intelligence is never to mistake the one for the other.

There are then ideal and inward relations amongst the objects of our thought which can in no intelligible sense whatever be interpreted as reproductions of the order of outer experience. In the æsthetic and ethical realms they conflict with its order -- the early Christian¹⁸¹ with his kingdom of heaven, and the contemporary anarchist¹⁸² with his abstract dream of justice, will tell you that the existing order must perish, root and branch, ere the true order can come. Now the peculiarity of those relations among the objects of our thought which are dubbed¹⁸³ 'scientific' is this, that although they no more are inward reproductions of the outer order than the ethical and æsthetic relations are, yet they do not conflict with that order, but, once having sprung up by the play of the inward forces, are found -- some of them at least, namely the only ones which have survived long enough to be matters of record -- to be congruent with the time- and space-relations which our impressions affect.

In other words, though nature's materials lend themselves slowly and discouragingly to our translation of them into ethical forms, but more readily into æsthetic forms; to translation into scientific forms they lend themselves with relative ease and completeness. The translation, it is true, will probably never be ended. The perceptive¹⁸⁴ order does not give way, nor the right conceptive substitute for it arise, at our bare word of command.10 It is often a deadly fight; and many a man of science can say, like Johannes Müller, after an investigation, 'Es klebt Blut an der Arbeit.' But victory after victory makes us sure that the essential doom¹⁸⁵ of our enemy is defeat.11
The Genesis of the Pure Sciences.

I have now stated in general terms the relation of the natural sciences to experience strictly so called, and shall complete what I have to say by reverting¹⁸⁷ to the subject on a later page. At present I will pass to the so-called pure or a priori sciences of Classification, Logic⁸¹, and Mathematics. My thesis concerning these is that they are even less than the natural sciences effects of the order of the world as it comes to our experience. THE PURE SCIENCES EXPRESS RESULTS OF COMPARISON exclusively; comparison is not a conceivable effect of the order in which outer impressions are experienced -- it is one of the house-born (p. 627) portions of our mental structure; therefore the pure sciences form a body of propositions with whose genesis experience has nothing to do.

First, consider the nature of comparison. The relations of resemblance and difference among things have nothing to do with the time- and space-order in which we may experience the latter. Suppose a hundred beings created by God and gifted with the faculties of memory and comparison. Suppose that upon each of them the same lot of sensations are imprinted, but in different orders. Let some of them have no single sensation more than once. Let some have this one and others that one repeated. Let every conceivable permutation prevail. And then let the magic-lantern show die out, and keep the creatures in a void eternity, with naught but their memories to muse¹⁸⁸ upon. Inevitably in their long leisure they will begin to play with the items of their experience and rearrange them, make classificatory series of them, place gray between white and black, orange between red and yellow, and trace all other degrees of resemblance and difference. And this new construction will be absolutely identical in all the hundred creatures, the diversity of the sequence of the original experiences having no effect as regards this rearrangement. Any and every form of sequence will give the same result, because the result expresses the relation between the inward natures of the sensations; and to that the question of their outward succession is quite irrelevant¹⁹⁰. Black will differ from white just as much in a world in which they always come close together as in one in which they always come far apart; just as much in one in which they appear rarely as in one in which they appear all the time.

But the advocate of 'persistent outer relations' may still return to the charge: These are what make us so sure that white and black differ, he may say; for in a world where sometimes black resembled white and sometimes differed from it, we could never be so sure. It is because in this world black and white have always differed that the sense of their difference has become a necessary form of thought. The pair of colors on the one hand and the sense of difference on the other, inseparably experienced, not only by ourselves but by our ancestors, have become inseparably connected in the mind. Not through any essential structure of the mind, which made difference the only possible feeling which they could arouse; no, but because they simply did differ so often that at last they begat in us an impotency to imagine them doing anything else, and made us accept such a fabulous¹⁹¹ account as that just presented, of creatures to whom a single experience would suffice to make us feel the neccessariness of this relation.

I know not whether Mr. Spencer would subscribe¹⁹² to this or not; -- nor do I care, for there are mysteries which press more for solution than the meaning of this vague writer's words. But to me such an explanation of our difference-judgment is absolutely unintelligible¹⁹³. We now find black and white different, the explanation says, because we have always have so found them. But why should we always have so found them? Why should difference have popped into our heads so invariably with the thought of them? There must have been either a subjective or an objective reason. The subjective reason can only be that our minds were so constructed that a sense of difference was the only sort of conscious transition possible between black and white; the objective reason can only be that difference was always there, with these colors, outside the mind as an objective fact. The subjective reason explains outer frequency by inward structure, not inward structure by outer frequency; and so surrenders the experience-theory. The objective reason simply says that if an outer difference is there the mind must needs know it -- which is no explanation at all, but a mere appeal to the fact that somehow the mind does know what is there.

The only clear thing to do is to give up the sham¹⁹⁴ of a pretended explanation, and to fall back on the fact that the sense of difference has arisen, in some natural manner doubtless, but in a manner which we do not understand. It was by the back-stairs way, at all events; and, from the very first, happened to be the only mode of reaction by which consciousness could feel the transition from one term to another of what (in consequence of this very reaction) we now call a contrasted pair.

In noticing the differences and resemblances of things, and their degrees, the mind feels its own activity, and has given the name of comparison thereto. It need not compare its materials, but if once roused to do so, it can compare them with but one result, and this a fixed consequence of the nature of the materials themselves. Difference and resemblance are thus relations between ideal objects, or conceptions as such. To learn whether black and white differ, I need not consult the world of experience at all; the mere ideas suffice. What I mean by black differs from what I mean by white, whether such colors exist extra mentem meam or not. If they ever do so exist, they will differ. White things may blacken, but the black of them will differ from the white of them, so long as I mean anything definite by these three words.12

I shall now in what follows call all propositions which express time- and space-relations empirical propositions; and I shall give the name of rational propositions to all propositions which express the results of a comparison. The latter denomination¹⁹⁵ is in a sense arbitrary, for resemblance and difference are not usually held to be the only rational relations between things. I will next proceed to show, however, how many other rational relations commonly supposed distinct can be resolved into these, so that my definition of rational propositions will end, I trust, by proving less arbitrary than it now appears to be.
Series of Even Difference and Mediate¹¹⁰ Comparison.

In Chapter XII we saw that the mind can at successive moments mean the same, and that it gradually comes into possession of a stock of permanent and fixed meanings, ideal objects, or conceptions, some of which are universal qualities, like the black and white of out example, and some, individual things. We now see that not only are the objects permanent mental possessions, but the results of their comparison are permanent too. The objects and their differences together form an immutable¹⁹⁶ system. The same objects, compared in the same way, always give the same results; if the result be not the same, then the objects are not those originally meant.

This last principle, which we may call the axiom of constant result, holds good throughout all our mental operations, not only when we compare, but when we add, divide, class, or infer a given matter in any conceivable way. Its most general expression would be "the Same operated on in the same way gives the Same." In mathematics it takes the form of "equals added to, or subtracted from, equals give equals," and the like. We shall meet with it again.

The next thing which we observe is that the operation of comparing may be repeated on its own results; in other words, that we can think of the various resemblances and differences which we find and compare them with each other, making differences and resemblances of a higher order. The mind thus becomes aware of sets of similar differences, and forms series of terms with the same kind and amount of difference between them, terms which, as they succeed each other, maintain a constant direction of serial¹⁹⁷ increase. This sense of constant direction in a series of operations we saw in Chapter XIII (p. 490) to be a cardinal¹⁹⁸ mental fact. "A differs from B differs from C differs from D, etc.," makes a series only when the differences are in the same direction. In any such difference-series all terms differ in just the same way from their predecessors¹⁹⁹. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . . the notes of the chromatic²⁰⁰ scale in music, are familiar examples. As soon as the mind grasps such a series as a whole, it perceives that two terms taken far apart differ more than two terms taken near together, and that any one term differs more from a remote than from a near successor, and this no matter what the terms may be, or what the sort of difference may be, provided it is always the same sort.

This PRINCIPLE OF MEDIATE COMPARISON might be briefly²⁰¹ (though obscurely) expressed by the formula "more than the more is more than the less" -- the words more and less standing simply for degrees of increase along a constant direction of differences. Such a formula would cover all possible cases, as, earlier than early is earlier than late, worse than bad is worse than good, east of east is east of west; etc., etc., ad libitum.13 Symbolically²⁰², we might write it as a < b < c < d . . . and say that any number of intermediaries may be expunged²⁰⁴ without obliging us to alter anything in what remains²⁰⁵ written.

The principle of mediate comparison is only one form of a law which holds in many series of homogeneously related terms, the law that skipping intermediary terms leaves relations the same. This AXIOM OF SKIPPED INTERMEDIARIES or of TRANSFERRED RELATIONS occurs, as we soon shall see, in logic as the fundamental principle of inference, in arithmetic as the fundamental property of the number-series, in geometry as that of the straight line, the plane and the parallel. It seems to be on the whole the broadest and deepest law of man's thought.

In certain lists of terms the result of comparison may be to find no-difference, or equality in place of difference. Here also intermediaries may be skipped, and mediate comparison be carried on with the general result expressed by the axiom of mediate equality, "equals of equals are equal," which is the great principle of the mathematical sciences. This too as a result of the mind's mere acuteness, and in utter independence of the order in which experiences come associated together. Symbolically, again: a = b = c = d . ., with the same consequence as regards expunging²⁰⁶ terms which we saw before.
Classificatory Series.

Thus we have a rather intricate system of necessary and immutable ideal truths of comparison, a system applicable to terms experienced in any order of sequence or frequency, or even to terms never experienced or to be experienced, such as the mind's imaginary constructions would be. These truths of comparison result in Classifications. It is, for some unknown reason, a, great æsthetic delight for the mind to break the order of experience, and class its materials in serial orders, proceeding from step to step of difference, and to contemplate²⁰⁷ untiringly the crossings and inosculations of the series among themselves. The first steps in most of the sciences are purely classificatory. Where facts fall easily into rich and intricate series (as plants and animals and chemical compounds do), the mere sight of the series fill the mind with a satisfaction sui generis; and a world whose real materials naturally lend themselves to serial classification is pro² tanto a more rational world, a world with which the mind will feel more intimate, than with a world in which they do not. By the pre-evolutionary naturalists²⁰⁸, whose generation has hardly passed away, classifications were supposed to be ultimate insights into God's mind, filling us with adoration²⁰⁹ of his ways. The fact that Nature lets us make them was a proof of the presence of his Thought in her bosom²¹⁰. So far as the facts of experience can not be serially²¹¹ classified, therefore, so far experience fails to be rational in one of the ways, at least, which we crave.
The Logic-Series.

Closely akin to the function of comparison is that of judging, predicating, or subsuming. In fact, these elementary intellectual functions run into each other so, that it is often only a question of practical convenience whether we shall call a given mental operation by the name of one or of the other. Comparisons result in groups of like things; and presently (through discrimination and abstraction) in conceptions of the respects in which the likenesses obtain. The groups are genera, or classes, the respects are characters or attributes. The attributes again may be compared, forming genera of higher orders, and their characters singled out; so that we have a new sort of series, that of predication, or of kind including kind. Thus horses are quadrupeds, quadrupeds animals, animals machines, machines liable to wear out, etc. In such a series as this the several couplings of terms may have been made out originally at widely different times and under different circumstances. But memory may bring them together afterwards; and whenever it does so, our faculty of apprehending²¹³ serial increase makes us conscious of them as a single system of successive terms united by the same relation.14

Now whenever we become thus conscious, we may become aware of an additional relation which is of the highest intellectual importance, inasmuch as upon it the whole structure of logic is reared. The principle of mediate predication or subsumption is only the axiom of skipped intermediaries applied²¹⁵ to a series of successive predications. It expresses the fact that any earlier term in the series stands to any later term in the same relation in which it stands to any intermediate term; in other words, that whatever has an attribute has all the attributes of that attribute; or more briefly still, that whatever is of a kind is of that kind's kind. A little explanation of this statement will bring out all that it involves.

We learned in the chapter on Reasoning what our great motive²¹⁶ is for abstracting attributes and predicating them. It is that our varying practical purposes require us to lay hold of different angles of the reality at different times. But for these we should be satisfied to 'see it whole,' and always alike. The purpose, however, makes one aspect essential; so, to avoid dispersion of the attention, we treat the reality as if for the time being it were nothing but that aspect, and we let its supernumerary determinations go. In short, we substitute the aspect for the whole real thing. For our purpose the aspect can be substituted for the whole, and the two treated as the same; and the word is (which couples the whole with its aspect or attribute in the categoric judgment) expresses (among other things) the identifying operation performed. The predication-series a is b, b is c, c is d, . . . . closely resembles for certain practical purposes the equation-series a = b, b = c, c = d, etc.

But what is our purpose in predicating? Ultimately, it may be anything we please; but proximately and immediately, it is always the gratification of a certain curiosity as to whether the object in hand is or is not of a kind connected with that ultimate purpose. Usually the connection is not obvious, and we only find that the object S is of a kind connected with P, after first finding that it is of a kind M, which itself is connected with P. Thus, to fix our ideas by an example, we have a curiosity (our ultimate purpose being conquest over nature) as to how Sirius may move. It is not obvious whether Sirius is a kind of thing which moves in the line of sight or not. When, however, we find it to be a kind of thing in whose spectrum²¹⁷ the hydrogen-line is shifted, and when we reflect that that kind of thing is a kind of thing which moves in the line of sight; we conclude that Sirius does so move. Whatever Sirius's attribute is, Sirius is; its adjective's adjective can supersede²¹⁸ its own adjective in our thinking, and this with no loss to our knowledge, so long as we stick to the definite purpose in view.

Now please note that this elimination of intermediary kinds and transfer of is's along the line, results from our insight into the very meaning of the word is, and into the constitution of any series of terms connected by that relation. It has naught to do with what any particular thing is or is not; but, whatever any given thing may be, we see that it also is whatever that is, indefinitely. To grasp in one view a, succession of is's is to apprehend²¹⁴ this relation between the terms which they connect; just as to grasp a list of successive equals is to apprehend their mutual²¹⁹ equality throughout. The principle of mediate subsumption thus expresses relations of ideal objects as such. It can be discovered by a mind left at leisure with any set of meanings (however originally obtained), of which some are predicable of others. The moment we string them in a serial line, that moment we see that we can drop intermediaries, use remote terms just like near ones, and put a genus in the place of a species. This shows that the principle of mediate subsumption has nothing to do with the particular order of our experiences, or with the outer coexistences and sequences of terms. Were it a mere outgrowth of habit and association, we should be forced to regard it as having no universal validity; for every hour of the day we meet things which we consider to be of this kind or of that, but later learn that they have none of the kind's properties, that they do not belong to the kind's kind. Instead, however, of correcting the principle by these cases, we correct the cases by the principle. We say that if the thing we named an M has not M's properties, then we were either mistaken in calling it an M, or mistaken about M's properties; or else that it is no longer M, but has changed. But we never say that it is an M without M's properties; for by conceiving a thing as of the kind M I mean that it shall have M's properties, be of M's kind, even though I should never be able to find in the real world anything which is an M. The principle emanates²²⁰ from my perception of what a lot of successive is's mean. This perception can no more be confirmed by one set, or weakened by another set, of outer facts, than the perception that black is not white can be confirmed by the fact that snow never blackens, or weakened by the fact that photographer's paper blackens as soon as you lay it in the sun.

The abstract scheme of successive predications, extended indefinitely, with all the possibilities of substitution which it involves, is thus an immutable system of truth which flows from the very structure and form of our thinking. If any real terms ever do fit into such a scheme, they will obey its laws; whether they do is a question as to nature's facts, the answer to which can only be empirically ascertained²²¹. Formal logic is the name of the Science which traces in skeleton form all the remote relations of terms connected by successive is's with each other, and enumerates²²² their possibilities of mutual substitution. To our principle of mediate subsumption she has given various formulations, of which the best is perhaps this broad expression, that the same can be substituted for the same in any mental operation.15

The ordinary logical series contains but three terms -- "Socrates, man, mortal." But we also have 'Sorites' --Socrates, man, animal, machine, run down, mortal, etc. -- and it violates psychology to represent these as syllogisms with terms suppressed. The ground of there being any logic at all is our power to grasp any series as a whole, and the more terms it holds the better. This synthetic²²³ consciousness of an uniform direction of advance through a multiplicity of terms is, apparently²²⁴, what the brutes and lower men cannot accomplish, and what gives to us our extraordinary power of ratiocinative thought. The mind which can grasp a string of is's as a whole -- the objects linked by them may be ideal or real, physical, mental, or symbolic²⁰³, indifferently -- can also apply to it the principle of skipped intermediaries. The logic-list is thus in its origin and essential nature just like those graded classificatory lists which we erewhile described. The 'rational proposition' which lies at the basis of all reasoning, the dictum de omni et nullo in all the various forms in which it may be expressed, the fundamental law of thought, is thus only the result of the function of comparison in a mind which has come by some lucky variation to apprehend a series of more than two terms at once.16 So far, then, both Systematic²²⁵ Classification and Logic are seen to be incidental results of the mere capacity for discerning difference and likeness²¹², which capacity is a thing with which the order of experience, properly so styled, has absolutely nothing to do.

But how comes it (it may next be asked) when systematic classifications have so little ultimate theoretic importance -- for the conceiving of things according to their mere degrees of resemblance always yields to other modes of conceiving when these can be obtained -- that the logical relations among things should form such a mighty²²⁶ engine for dealing¹³⁹ with the facts of life?

Chapter XXII already gave the reason (see p. 335, above). This world might be a world in which all things differed, and in which what properties there were were ultimate and had no farther predicates. In such a world there would be as many kinds as there were separate things. We could never subsume a new thing under an old kind; or if we could, no consequences would follow. Or, again, this might be a world in which innumerable things were of a kind, but in which no concrete thing remained of the same kind long, but all objects were in a flux²²⁷. Here again, though we could subsume and infer, our logic would be of no practical use to us, for the subjects of our propositions would have changed whilst we were talking. In such worlds, logical relations would obtain, and be known (doubtless) as they are now, but they would form a merely theoretic scheme and be of no use for the conduct of life. But our world is no such world. It is a very peculiar world, and plays right into logic's hands. Some of the things, at least, which it contains are of the same kind as other things; some of them remain always of the kind of which they once were; and some of the properties of them cohere⁷¹ indissolubly and are always found together. Which things these latter things are we learn by experience in the strict sense of the word, and the results of the experience are embodied²²⁸ in 'empirical propositions.' Whenever such a thing is met with by us now, our sagacity notes it to be of a certain kind; our learning immediately recalls that kind's kind, and then that kind's kind, and so on; so that a moment's thinking may make us aware that the thing is of a kind so remote that we could never have directly perceived the connection. The flight to this last kind over the heads of the intermediaries is the essential feature of the intellectual operation here. Evidently it is a pure outcome of our sense for apprehending serial increase; and, unlike the several propositions themselves which make up the series (and which may all be empirical), it has nothing to do with the time- and space-order in which the things have been experienced.
Mathematical Relations.

So much for the a priori necessities called systematic classification and logical inference. The other couplings of data which pass for a priori necessities of thought are the mathematical judgments, and certain metaphysical propositions. These latter we shall consider farther on. As regards the mathematical judgments, they are all 'rational propositions' in the sense defined on p. 644, for they express results of comparison and nothing more. The mathematical sciences deal with similarities and equalities exclusively, and not with coexistences and sequences. Hence they have, in the first instance, no connection with the order of experience. The comparisons of mathematics are between numbers and extensive magnitudes, giving rise to arithmetic and geometry respectively.

Number seems to signify primarily the strokes of our attention in discriminating²²⁹ things. These strokes remain in the memory in groups, large or small, and the groups can be compared. The discrimination is, as we know, psychologically facilitated by the mobility²³⁰ of the thing as a total (p. 173). But within each thing we discriminate²³¹ parts; so that the number of things which any one given phenomenon may be depends in the last instance on our way of taking it. A globe is one, if undivided; two, if composed of hemispheres. A sand-heap is one thing, or twenty thousand things, as we may choose to count it. We amuse ourselves by the counting of mere strokes, to form rhythms, and these we compare and name. Little by little in our minds the number-series is formed. This, like all lists of terms in which there is a direction of serial increase, carries with it the sense of those mediate relations between its terms which we expressed by the axiom "the more than the more is more than the less." That axiom seems, in fact, only a way of stating that the terms do form an increasing series. But, in addition to this, we are aware of certain other relations among our strokes of counting. We may interrupt them where we like, and go on again. All the while we feel that the interruption does not alter the strokes themselves. We may count 12 straight through; or count 7 and pause, and then count 5, but still the strokes will be the same. We thus distinguish between our acts of counting and those of interrupting or grouping, as between an unchanged matter and an operation of mere shuffling performed on it. The matter is the original units or strokes; which all modes of grouping or combining simply give us back unchanged. In short, combinations of numbers are combinations of their units, which is the fundamental axiom of arithmetic,17 leading to such consequences as that 7 + 5 = 8 + 4 because both = 12. The general axiom of mediate equality, that equals of equals are equal, comes in here.18 The principle of constancy in our meanings, when applied to strokes of counting, also gives rise to the axiom that the same number, operated on (interrupted, grouped) in the same way will always give the same result or be the same. How shouldn't it? Nothing is supposed changed.

Arithmetic and its fundamental principles are thus independent of our experiences or of the order of the world. The matter of arithmetic is mental matter; its principles flow from the fact that the matter forms a series, which can be cut into by us wherever we like without the matter changing. The empiricist school has strangely tried to interpret the truths of number as results of coexistences among outward things. John Mill calls number a physical property of things. 'One,' according to Mill, means one sort of passive sensation which we receive, 'two' another, 'three' a third. The same things, however, can give us different number-sensations. Three things arranged thus, °°°, for example, impress us differently from three things arranged thus,dots. But experience tells us that every real object-group which can be arranged in one of these ways can always be arranged in the other also, and that 2 + 1 and 3 are thus modes of numbering things which 'coexist' invariably with each other. The indefeasibility of our belief in their 'co-existence' (which is Mill's word for their equivalence) is due solely²³² to the enormous amount of experience we have of it. For all things, whatever other sensations they may give us, give us at any rate number-sensations. Those number-sensations which the same thing may be successively made to arouse are the numbers which we deem equal to each other; those which the same thing refuses to arouse are those which we deem unequal.

This is as clear a restatement as I can make of Mill's doctrine.19 And its failure is written upon its front. Woe²³³ to arithmetic, were such the only grounds for its validity! The same real things are countable⁷⁵ in numberless ways, and pass from one numerical form, not only to its equivalent (as Mill implies), but to its other, as the sport of physical accidents or of our mode of attending may decide. How could our notion that one and one are eternally and necessarily two ever maintain itself in a world where every time we add one drop of water to another we get not two but one again? in a world where every time we add a drop to a crumb²³⁴ of quicklime we get a dozen or more? -- had it no better warrant than such experiences? At most we could then say that one and one are usually two. Our arithmetical propositions would never have the confident tone which they now possess. That confident tone is due to the fact that they deal with abstract and ideal numbers exclusively. What we mean by one plus one is two; we make two out of it; and it would mean two still even in a world where physically²³⁵ (according to a conceit²³⁶ of Mill's) a third thing was engendered every time one thing came together with another. We are masters of our meanings, and discriminate between the things we mean and our ways of taking them, between our strokes of numeration themselves, and our bundlings and separatings thereof.

Mill ought not only to have said, "All things are numbered." He ought, in order to prove his point, to have shown that they are unequivocally numbered, which they notoriously are not. Only the abstract numbers themselves are unequivocal, only those which we create mentally and hold fast to as ideal objects always the same. A concrete natural thing can always be numbered in a great variety of ways. "We need only conceive a thing divided into four equal parts (and all things may be conceived as so divided)," as Mill is himself compelled to say, to find the number four in it, and so on.

The relation of numbers to experience is just like that of 'kinds' in logic. So long as an experience will keep its kind we can handle it by logic. So long as it will keep its number we can deal with it by arithmetic. Sensibly, however, things are constantly changing their numbers, just as they are changing their kinds. They are forever breaking apart and fusing. Compounds and their elements are never numerically identical, for the elements are sensibly many and the compounds sensibly one. Unless our arithmetic is to remain without application to life, we must somehow make more numerical continuity than we spontaneously find. Accordingly Lavoisier discovers his weight-units which remain the same in compounds and elements, though volume-units and quality-units all have changed. A great discovery! And modern science outdoes it by denying that compounds exist at all. There is no such thing as 'water' for 'science;' that is only a handy name for H2 and O when they have got into the position H-O-H, and then affect our senses in a novel way. The modern theories of atoms, of heat, and of gases are, in fact, only intensely artificial devices for gaining that constancy in the numbers of things which sensible experience will not show. "Sensible things are not the things for me," says Science, "because in their changes they will not keep their numbers the same. Sensible qualities are not the qualities for me, because they can with difficulty be numbered at all. These hypothetic atoms, however, are the things, these hypothetic masses and velocities²³⁷ are the qualities for me; they will stay numbered all the time."

By such elaborate inventions, and at such a cost to the imagination, do men succeed in making for themselves a world in which real things shall be coerced²³⁸ per fas aut nefas under arithmetical law.

The other branch of mathematics is geometry. Its objects are also ideal creations. Whether nature contain circles or not, I can know what I mean by a circle and can stick to my meaning; and when I mean two circles I mean two things of an identical kind. The axiom of constant results (see above, p. 645) holds in geometry. The same forms, treated in the same way (added, subtracted, or compared), give the same results -- how shouldn't they? The axioms of mediate comparison (p. 645), of logic (p. 648), and of number (p. 654) all apply to the forms which we imagine in space, inasmuch as these resemble or differ from each other, form kinds, and are numerable things. But in addition to these general principles, which are true of space-forms only as they are of other mental conceptions, there are certain axioms relative to space-forms exclusively, which we must briefly consider.

Three of them give marks of identity among straight lines, planes, and parallels. Straight lines which have two points, planes which have three points, parallels to a given line which have one point, in common, coalesce²³⁹ throughout. Some say that the certainty of our belief in these axioms is due to repeated experiences of their truth; others that it is due to an intuitive acquaintance with the properties of space. It is neither. We experience lines enough which pass through two points only to separate again, only we won't call them straight. Similarly of planes and parallels. We have a definite idea of what we mean by each of these words; and when something different is offered us, we see the difference. Straight lines, planes, and parallels, as they figure in geometry, are mere inventions of our faculty for apprehending serial increase. The farther continuations of these forms, we say, shall bear the same relation to their last visible parts which these did to still earlier parts. It thus follows (from that axiom of skipped intermediaries which obtains in all regular series) that parts of these figures separated by other parts must agree in direction, just as contiguous parts do. This uniformity of direction throughout is, in fact, all that makes us care for these forms, gives them their beauty, and stamps them into fixed conceptions in our mind. But obviously if two lines, or two planes, with a common segment, were to part company beyond the segment, it could only be because the direction of at least one of them had changed. Parting company in lines and planes means changing direction, means assuming a new relation to the parts that pre-exist; and assuming a new relation means ceasing to be straight or plane. If we mean by a parallel a line that will never meet a second line; and if we have one such line drawn through a point, any third line drawn through that point which does not coalesce with the first must be inclined to it, and if inclined to it must approach the second, i.e., cease to be parallel with it. No properties of outlying space need come in here: only a definite conception of uniform direction, and constancy in sticking to one's point.

The other two axioms peculiar to geometry are that figures can be moved in space without change, and that no variation in the way of subdividing²⁴⁰ a given amount of space alters its total quantity.20 This last axiom is similar to what we found to obtain in numbers. 'The whole is equal to its parts' is an abridged²⁴¹ way of expressing it. A man is not the same biological whole if we cut him in two at the neck as if we divide him at the ankles; but geometrically he is the same whole, no matter in which place we cut him. The axiom about figures being movable in space is rather a postulate than an axiom. So far as theyare so movable, then certain fixed equalities and differences obtain between forms, no matter where placed. But if translation through space warped²⁴² or magnified forms, then the relations of equality, etc., would always have to be expressed with a position-qualification added. A geometry as absolutely certain as ours could be invented on the supposition of such a space, if the laws of its warping²⁴³ and deformation²⁴⁴ were fixed. It would, however, be much more complicated than our geometry, which makes the simplest possible supposition; and finds, luckily enough, that it is a supposition with which the space of our experience seems to agree.

By means of these principles, all playing into each other's hands, the mutual equivalences of an immense number of forms can be traced, even of such as at first sight bear hardly any resemblance to each other. We move and turn them mentally, and find that parts of them will superpose. We add imaginary lines which subdivide²⁴⁵ or enlarge them, and find that the new figures resemble each other in ways which show us that the old ones are equivalent too. We thus end by expressing all sorts of forms in terms of other forms, enlarging our knowledge of the kinds of things which certain other kinds of things are; or to which they are equivalent.

The result is a new system of mental objects which can be treated as identical for certain purposes, a new series of is's almost indefinitely prolonged, just like the series of equivalencies among numbers, part of which the multiplication-table expresses. And all this is in the first instance regardless of the coexistences and sequences of nature, and regardless of whether the figures we speak of have ever been outwardly experienced or not.
Consciousness of Series is the Basis of Rationality.

Classification, logic, and mathematics all result, then, from the mere play of the mind comparing its conceptions, no matter whence the latter may have come. The essential condition for the formation of all these sciences is that we should have grown capable of apprehending series as such, and of distinguishing them as homogeneous or heterogeneous²⁴⁶, and as possessing definite directions of what I have called 'increase.' This consciousness of series is a human perfection which has been gradually evolved, and which varies amazingly from one man to another. No accounting²⁴⁷ for it as a result of habitual associations among outward impressions, so we must simply ascribe it to the factors, whatever they be, of inward cerebral growth. Once this consciousness attained²⁴⁸ to, however, mediate thought becomes possible; with our very awareness²⁴⁹ of a series may go an awareness that dropping terms out of it will leave identical relations between the terms that remain; and thus arises a perception of relations between things so naturally separate that we should otherwise never have compared them together at all.

The axiom of skipped intermediaries applies, however, only to certain particular series, and among them to those which we have considered, in which the recurring²⁵⁰ relation is either of difference, of likeness, of kind, of numerical addition, or of prolongation in the same linear or plane direction. It is therefore not a purely formal law of thinking, but flows from the nature of the matters thought about. It will not do to say universally that in all series of homogeneously related terms the remote members are related to each other as the near ones are; for that will often be untrue. The series A is not B is not C is not D . . . does not permit the relation to be traced between remote terms. From two negations no inference can be drawn. Nor, to become more concrete, does the lover of a woman generally love her beloved, or the contradictor of a contradictor contradict whomever he contradicts. The slayer²⁵² of a slayer does not slay²⁵³ the latter's victim; the acquaintances or enemies of a man need not be each other's acquaintances or enemies; nor are two things which are on top of a third thing necessarily on top of each other.

All skipping of intermediaries and transfer of relations occurs within homogeneous series. But not all homogeneous series allow of intermediaries being skipped and relations transferred. It depends on which series they are, on what relations they contain.21 Let it not be said that it is a mere matter of verbal association, due to the fact that language sometimes permits us to transfer the name of a relation over skipped intermediaries, and sometimes does not; as where we call men 'progenitors²⁵⁴' of their remote as well as of their immediate posterity²⁵⁵, but refuse to call them 'fathers' thereof. There are relations which are intrinsically transferable, whilst others are not. The relation of condition, e.g., is intrinsically transferable. What conditions a condition conditions what it conditions -- "cause of cause is cause of effect." The relations of negation²⁵¹ and frustration, on the other hand, are not transferable: what frustrates²⁵⁶ a frustration does not frustrate²⁵⁷ what it frustrates. No changes of terminology²⁵⁸ would annul¹¹⁵ the intimate difference between these two cases.

Nothing but the clear sight of the ideas themselves shows whether the axiom of skipped intermediaries applies to them or not. Their connections, immediate and remote, flow from their inward natures. We try to consider them in certain ways, to bring them into certain relations, and we find that sometimes we can and sometimes we cannot.

The question whether there are or are not inward and essential connections between conceived objects as such, really is the same thing as the question whether we can get any new perception from mentally coupling them together, or pass from one to another by a mental operation which gives a result. In the case of some ideas and operations we get a result; but no result in the case of others. Where a result comes, it is due exclusively to the nature of the ideas and of the operation. Take blueness and yellowness, for example. We can operate on them in some ways, but not in other ways. We can compare them; but we cannot add one to or subtract it from the other. We can refer them to a common kind, color; but we cannot make one a kind of the other, or infer one from the other. This has nothing to do with experience. For we can add blue pigment²⁵⁹ to yellow pigment, and subtract it again, and get a result both times. Only we know perfectly that this is no addition or subtraction²⁶⁰ of the blue and yellow qualities or natures themselves.22

There is thus no denying the fact that the mind is filled with necessary and eternal relations which it finds between certain of its ideal conceptions, and which form a determinate system, independent of the order of frequency in which experience may have associated the conception's originals in time and space.

Shall we continue to call these sciences 'intuitive,' 'innate,' or 'a priori' bodies of truth, or not?23 Personally I should like to do so. But I hesitate to use the terms, on account of the odium which controversial history has made the whole of their connotation for many worthy²⁶¹ persons. The most politic²⁶² way not to alienate²⁶³ these readers is to flourish the name of the immortal²⁶⁴ Locke. For in truth I have done nothing more in the previous pages than to make a little more explicit²⁶⁵ the teachings of Locke's fourth book:

"The immutability²⁶⁶ of the same relations between the same immutable things is now the idea that shows him that if the three angles of a triangle were once equal to two right angles, they will always be equal to two right ones. And hence he comes to be certain that what was once true in the case is always true; what ideas once agreed will always agree . . . Upon this ground it is that particular demonstrations²⁶⁷ in mathematics afford general knowledge. If, then, the perception that the same ideas will eternally have the same habitudes and relations be not a sufficient ground of knowledge, there could be no knowledge of general propositions in mathematics. . . . All general knowledge lies only in our own thoughts, and consists barely in the contemplation of our abstract ideas. Wherever we perceive any agreement or disagreement amongst them, there we have general knowledge; and by putting the names of those ideas together accordingly in propositions, can with certainty pronounce general truths. . . . What is once known of such ideas will be perpetually and forever true. So that, as to all general knowledge, we must search and find it only in our own minds and it is only the examining of our own ideas that furnisheth us with that. Truths belonging to essences of things (that is, to abstract ideas) are eternal, and are to be found out only by the contemplation of those essences. . . . Knowledge is the consequence of the ideas (be they what they will) that are in our minds, producing there certain general propositions . . . . Such propositions are therefore called 'eternal truths,' . . . because, being once made about abstract ideas so as to be true, they will, whenever they can be supposed to be made again, at any time past or to come, by a mind having those ideas, always actually be true. For names being supposed to stand perpetually for the same ideas, and the same ideas having immutably²⁶⁸ the same habitudes one to another, propositions concerning any abstract ideas that are once true must needs be eternal verities²⁶⁹."

But what are these eternal verities, these 'agreements,' which the mind discovers by barely considering its own fixed meanings, except what I have said? -- relations of likeness and difference, immediate or mediate, between the terms of certain series. Classification is serial comparison, logic mediate subsumption, arithmetic mediate equality of different bundles of attention-strokes, geometry mediate equality of different ways of carving²⁷⁰ space. None of these eternal verities has anything to say about facts, about what is or is not in the world. Logic does not say whether Socrates, men, mortals or immortals²⁷¹ exist; arithmetic does not tell us where her 7's, 5's, and 12's are to be found; geometry affirms not that circles and rectangles are real. All that these sciences make us sure of is, that if these things are anywhere to be found, the eternal verities will obtain of them. Locke accordingly never tires of telling us that the "universal propositions of whose truth or falsehood we can have certain knowledge, concern not existence . . . . These universal and self-evident principles, being only our constant, clear, and distinct knowledge of our own ideas more general or comprehensive, can assure us of nothing that passes without the mind; their certainty is founded only upon the knowledge of each idea by itself, and of its distinction from others; about which we cannot be mistaken whilst they are in our minds. . . . The mathematician²⁷² considers the truth and properties belonging to a rectangle or circle only as they are in idea in his own mind. For it is possible he never found either of them existing mathematically, i.e., precisely²⁷³ true, in his life. But yet the knowledge he has of any truths or properties belonging to a circle, or any other mathematical figure, are nevertheless true and certain even of real things existing; because real things are no farther concerned nor intended to be meant by any such propositions, than as things really agree to those archetypes in his mind. Is it true of the idea of a triangle, that its three angles are equal to two right ones? It is true also of a triangle wherever it really exists. Whatever other figure exists that is not exactly answerable to that idea in his mind is not at all concerned in that proposition. And therefore he is certain all his knowledge concerning such ideas is real knowledge: because, intending things no farther than they agree with those his ideas, he is sure what he knows concerning those figures when they have barely an ideal existence in his mind will hold true of them also when they have a real existence in matter." But "that any or what bodies do exist, that we are left to our senses to discover to us as far as they can."24

Locke accordingly distinguishes between 'mental truth' and 'real truth.'25 The former is intuitively certain; the latter dependent on experience. Only hypothetically can we affirm intuitive truths of real things -- by supposing, namely, that real things exist which correspond exactly with the ideal subjects of the intuitive propositions.

If our senses corroborate²⁷⁴ the supposition all goes well. But note the strange descent in Locke's hands of the dignity of a priori propositions. By the ancients they were considered, without farther question, to reveal the constitution of Reality. Archetypal things existed, it was assumed, in the relations in which we had to think them. The mind's necessities were a warrant for those of Being; and it was not till Descartes' time that scepticism had so advanced (in 'dogmatic' circles) that the warrant must itself be warranted, and the veracity²⁷⁵ of the Deity²⁷⁶ invoked²⁷⁷ as a reason for holding fast to our natural beliefs.

But the intuitive propositions of Locke leave us as regards outer reality none the better for their possession. We still have to "go to our senses" to find what the reality is. The vindication²⁷⁸ of the intuitionist position is thus a barren victory. The eternal verities which the very structure of our mind lays hold of do not necessarily themselves lay hold on extra-mental being, nor have they, as Kant pretended later,26 a legislating²⁷⁹ character even for all possible experience. They are primarily interesting only as subjective facts. They stand waiting in the mind, forming a beautiful ideal network; and the most we can say is that we hope to discover realities over which the network may be flung so that ideal and real may coincide.

And this brings us back to 'science' from which we diverted our attention so long ago (see p. 640). Science thinks she has discovered the objective realities in question. Atoms and ether, with no properties but masses and velocities expressible by numbers, and paths expressible by analytic²⁸⁰ formulas, these at last are things over which the mathematico-logical network may be flung, and by supposing which instead of sensible phenomena science becomes yearly more able to manufacture for herself a world about which rational propositions may be framed. Sensible phenomena are pure delusions²⁸¹ for the mechanical philosophy. The 'things' and qualities we instinctively²⁸² believe in do not exist. The only realities are swarming²⁸³ solids in everlasting²⁸⁴ motion, undulatory or continued, whose expressionless and meaningless changes of position form the history of the world, and are deducible from initial collocations and habits of movement hypothetically assumed. Thousands of years ago men started to cast the chaos of nature's sequences and juxtapositions²⁸⁶ into a form that might seem intelligible. Many were their ideal prototypes of rational order: teleological²⁸⁷ and æsthetic ties between things, causal and substantial bonds, as well as logical and mathematical relations. The most promising²⁸⁸ of these ideal systems at first were of course the richer ones, the sentimental²⁸⁹ ones. The baldest and least promising were the mathematical ones; but the history of the latter's application is a history of steadily²⁹⁰ advancing successes, whilst that of the sentimentally²⁹¹ richer systems is one of relative sterility²⁹² and failure.27 Take those aspects of phenomena which interest you as a human being most, and class the phenomena as perfect and imperfect, as ends and means to ends, as high and low, beautiful and ugly, positive and negative, harmonious²⁹³ and discordant²⁹⁴, fit and unfit, natural and unnatural²⁹⁵, etc., and barren are all your results. In the ideal world the kind 'precious' has characteristic properties. What is precious should be preserved; unworthy things should be sacrificed for its sake; exceptions made on its account; its preciousness is a reason for other things' actions, and the like. But none of these things need happen to your 'precious' object in the real world. Call the things of nature as much as you like by sentimental, moral, and æsthetic names, no natural consequences follow from the naming. They may be of the kinds you allege²⁹⁶, but they are not of 'the kind's kind; and the last great system-maker of this sort, Hegel, was obliged explicitly²⁹⁷ to repudiate²⁹⁸ logic in order to make any inferences at all from the names he called things by.

But when you give things mathematical and mechanical names and call them just so many solids in just such positions, describing just such paths with just such velocities, all is changed. Your sagacity finds its reward in the verification by nature of all the deductions²⁹⁹ which you may next proceed to make. Your 'things' realize all the consequences of the names by which you classed them. The modern mechanico-physical philosophy of which we are all so proud, because it includes the nebular cosmogony, the conservation of energy, the kinetic³⁰⁰ theory of heat and gases, etc., etc., begins by saying that the only facts are collocations and motions of primordial³⁰¹ solids, and the only laws the changes of motion which changes in collocation bring. The ideal which this philosophy strives after is a mathematical world-formula, by which, if all the collocations and motions at a given moment were known, it would be possible to reckon those of any wished-for future moment, by simply considering the necessary geometrical, arithmetical, and logical implications. Once we have the world in this bare shape, we can fling our net of a priori relations over all its terms, and pass from one of its phases to another by inward thought-necessity. Of course it is a world with a very minimum of rational stuff. The sentimental facts and relations are butchered at a blow. But the rationality yielded is so superbly complete in form that to many minds this atones³⁰² for the loss, and reconciles the thinker to the notion of a purposeless universe, in which all the things and qualities men love, dulcissima mundi nomina, are but illusions of our fancy attached to accidental clouds of dust which the eternal cosmic weather will dissipate as carelessly as it has formed them.

The popular notion that 'Science' is forced on the mind ab extra, and that our interests have nothing to do with its constructions, is utterly absurd. The craving³⁰³ to believe that the things of the world belong to kinds which are related by inward rationality together, is the parent of Science as well as of sentimental philosophy; and the original investigator³⁰⁴ always preserves a healthy sense of how plastic the materials are in his hands.

"Once for all," says Helmholtz in beginning that little work of his which laid the foundations of the 'conservation of energy,' "it is the task of the physical sciences to seek for laws by which particular processes in nature may be referred to general rules, and deduced from such again. Such rules (for example the laws of reflection or refraction of light, or that of Mariotte and Gay-Lussac for gas-volumes) are evidently nothing but generic-concepts for embracing whole classes of phenomena. The search for them is the business of the experimental division of our Science. Its theoretic division, on the other hand, tries to discover the unknown causes of processes from their visible effects; tries to understand them by the law of causality. . . . The ultimate goal of theoretic physics is to find the last unchanging causes of the processes in Nature. Whether all processes be really ascribable to such causes, whether, in other words, nature be completely intelligible, or whether there be changes which would elude³⁰⁵ the law of a necessary causality, and fall into a realm of spontaneity or freedom, is not here the place to determine: but at any rate it is clear that the Science whose aim it is to make nature appear intelligible [die Natur zu begreifen {James' insertion}] must start with the assumption of her intelligibility³⁰⁶, and draw consequences in conformity³⁰⁷ with this assumption, until irrefutable facts show the limitations of this method. . . . The postulate that natural phenomena must be reduced to changeless ultimate causes next shapes itself so that forces unchanged by time must be found to be these causes. Now in Science we have already found portions of matter with changeless forces (indestructible qualities), and called them (chemical) elements. If, then, we imagine the world composed of elements with inalterable qualities, the only changes that can remain possible in such a world are spatial³⁰⁸ changes, i.e. movements, and the only outer relations which can modify the action of the forces are spatial too or, in other words, the forces are motor forces dependent for their effect only on spatial relations. More exactly still: The phenomena of nature must be reduced to [zurückgeführt, conceived as, classed as {James' insertion}] motions of material points with inalterable motor forces acting²⁰ according to space-relations alone. . . . But points have no mutual space-relations except their distance, . . . and a motor force which they exert upon each other can cause nothing but a change of distance -- i.e. be an attractive or a repulsive³⁰⁹ force. . . . And its intensity³¹⁰ can only depend on distance. So that at last the task of Physics resolves itself into this, to refer phenomena to inalterable attractive and repulsive forces whose intensity varies with distance. The solution of this task would at the same time be the condition of Nature's complete intelligibility."28

The subjective interest leading to the assumption could not be more candidly³¹¹ expressed. What makes the assumption 'scientific' and not merely poetic³¹², what makes a Helmholtz and his kin¹² discoverers, is that the things of Nature turn out to act as if they were of the kind assumed. They behave as such mere drawing and driving atoms would behave; and so far as they have been distinctly enough translated into molecular terms to test the point, so far a certain fantastically ideal object, namely, the mathematical sum containing their mutual distances and velocities, is found to be constant throughout all their movements. This sum is called the total energy of the molecules considered. Its constancy or 'conservation' gives the name to the hypothesis of molecules and central forces from which it was logically deduced.

Take any other mathematico-mechanical theory and it is the same. They are all translations of sensible experiences into other forms, substitutions of items between which ideal relations of kind, number, form, equality, etc., obtain, for items between which no such relations obtain; coupled with declarations that the experienced form is false and the ideal form true, declarations which are justified³¹³ by the appearance of new sensible experiences at just those times and places at which we logically infer that their ideal correlates ought to be. Wave-hypotheses thus make us predict things of darkness and color, distortions, dispersions, changes of pitch in sonorous³¹⁴ bodies moving from us, etc.; molecule-hypotheses lead to predictions of vapor-density, freezing point, etc., -- all which predictions fall true.

Thus the world grows more orderly and rational to the mind, which passes from one feature of it to another by deductive necessity, as soon as it conceives it as made up of so few and so simple phenomena as bodies with no properties but number and movement to and fro.
Metaphysical Axioms.

But alongside of these ideal relations between terms which the world verifies, there are other ideal relations not as yet so verified. I refer to those propositions (no longer expressing mere results of comparison) which are formulated in such metaphysical and æsthetic axioms as "The Principle of things is one;" "The quantity of existence is unchanged;" "Nature is simple and invariable;" "Nature acts by the shortest ways;" "Ex nihilo nihil fit;" "Nothing can be evolved which was not involved;" "Whatever is in the effect must be in the cause;" "A thing can only work where it is;" "A thing can only affect another of its own kind;" "Cessante causa, cessat et effectus;" "Nature makes no leaps;" "Things belong to discrete³¹⁵ and permanent kinds;" "Nothing is or happens without a reason;" "The world is throughout rationally intelligible;" etc., etc., etc. Such principles as these, which might be multiplied to satiety,29 are properly to be called postulates³¹⁶ of rationality, not propositions of fact. If nature did obey them, she would be pro tanto more intelligible; and we seek meanwhile so to conceive her phenomena as to show that she does obey them. To a certain extent we succeed. For example, instead of the 'quantity of existence' so vaguely³¹⁷ postulated³¹⁸ as unchanged, Nature allows us to suppose that curious sum of distances and velocities which for want of a better term we call 'energy.' For the effect being 'contained in the cause,' nature lets us substitute 'the effect is the cause,' so soon as she lets us conceive both effect and cause as the same molecules, in two successive positions. -- But all around these incipient³¹⁹ successes (as all around the molecular world, so soon as we add to it as its 'effects' those illusory 'things' of common-sense which we had to butcher for its sake), there still spreads a vast field of irrationalized fact whose items simply are together, and from one to another of which we can pass by no ideally 'rational' way.

It is not that these more metaphysical postulates of rationality are absolutely barren -- though barren enough they were when used, as the scholastics used them, as immediate propositions of fact.30 They have a fertility as ideals, and keep us uneasy and striving always to recast the world of sense until its lines become more congruent with theirs. Take for example the principle that 'nothing can happen without a cause.' We have no definite idea of what we mean by cause, or of what causality consists in. But the principle expresses a demand for some deeper sort of inward connection between phenomena than their merely habitual time-sequence seems to us to be. The word 'cause' is, in short, an altar to an unknown god; an empty pedestal still marking the place of a hoped-for statue. Any really inward belonging-together of the sequent terms, if discovered, would be accepted as what the word cause was meant to stand for. So we seek, and seek; and in the molecular systems we find a sort of inward belonging in the notion of identity of matter with change of collocation. Perhaps by still seeking we may find other sorts of inward belonging, even between the molecules and those 'secondary qualities,' etc., which they produce upon our minds.

It cannot be too often repeated that the triumphant³²¹ application of any one of our ideal systems of rational relations to the real world justifies³²² our hope that other systems may be found also applicable. Metaphysics should take heart from the example of physics, simply confessing that hers is the longer task. Nature may be remodelled³²³, nay, certainly will be remodelled, far beyond the point at present reached. Just how far? -- is a question which only the whole future history of Science and Philosophy can answer.31 Our task being Psychology, we cannot even cross the threshold of that larger problem.

Besides the mental structure which results in such metaphysical principles as those just considered, there is a mental structure which expresses itself in
ÆSthetic and Moral Principles.

The æsthetic principles are at bottom such axioms as that a note sounds good with its third and fifth, or that potatoes need salt, We are once for all so made that when certain impressions come before our mind, one of them will seem to call for or repel³²⁴ the others as its companions. To a certain extent the principle of habit will explain these æsthetic connections. When a conjunction is repeatedly experienced, the cohesion of its terms grows grateful, or at least their disruption grows unpleasant. But to explain all æsthetic judgments in this way would be absurd; for it is notorious how seldom natural experiences come up to our æsthetic demands. Many of the so-called metaphysical principles are at bottom only expressions of æsthetic feeling. Nature is simple and invariable; makes no leaps, or makes nothing but leaps; is rationally intelligible; neither increases nor diminishes in quantity; flows from one principle, etc., etc., -- what do all such principles express save our sense of how pleasantly our intellect would feel if it had a Nature of that sort to deal with? The subjectivity³²⁵ of which feeling is of course quite compatible with Nature also turning out objectively to be of that sort, later on.

The moral principles which our mental structure engenders³²⁶ are quite as little explicable in toto by habitual experiences having bred inner cohesions. Rightness is not mere usualness, wrongness not mere oddity, however numerous the facts which might be invoked to prove such identity. Nor are the moral judgments those most invariably and emphatically impressed on us by public opinion. The most characteristically and peculiarly moral judgments that a man is ever called on to make are in unprecedented³²⁷ cases and lonely emergencies, where no popular rhetorical maxims³²⁸ can avail, and the hidden oracle³²⁹ alone can speak; and it speaks often in favor of conduct quite unusual, and suicidal as far as gaining popular approbation³³⁰ goes. The forces which conspire³³¹ to this resultant are subtle harmonies and discords³³² between the elementary ideas which form the data of the case. Some of these harmonies, no doubt, have to do with habit; but in respect to most of them our sensibility must assuredly be a phenomenon of supernumerary order, correlated with a brain-function quite as secondary as that which takes cognizance of the diverse excellence³³³ of elaborate musical compositions. No more than the higher musical sensibility can the higher moral sensibility be accounted for by the frequency with which outer relations have cohered³³⁴.32 Take judgments of justice or equity³³⁵, for example. Instinctively, one judges everything differently, according as it pertains³³⁶ to one's self or to some one else, Empirically one that everybody else does the same. But little by little there dawns in one the judgment "nothing can be right for me which would not be right for another similarly placed;" or the fulfilment of my desires is intrinsically no more imperative³³⁷ than that of anyone else's;" or "what it is reasonable that another should do for me, it is also reasonable that I should do for him;"33 and forthwith the whole mass of the habitual gets overturned. It gets seriously overturned only in a few fanatical heads. But its overturning is due to a back-door and not to a front-door process. Some minds are preternaturally sensitive to logical consistency³³⁸ and inconsistency. When they have ranked a thing under a kind, they must treat it as of that kind's kind, or feel all out of tune⁹⁴. In many respects we do class ourselves with other men, and call them and ourselves by a common name. They agree with us in having the same Heavenly Father, in not being consulted about their birth, in not being themselves to thank or blame for their natural gifts, in having the same desires and pains and pleasures, in short in a host of fundamental relations. Hence, if these things be our essence, we should be substitutable for other men, and they for us, in any proposition in which either of us is involved. The more fundamental and common the essence chosen, and the more simple the reasoning,34 the more wildly radical³³⁹ and unconditional³⁴⁰ will the justice be which is aspired³⁴¹ to. Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them as individual facts. The logical stickler³⁴² for justice always seems pedantic³⁴³ and mechanical to the man who goes by tact³⁴⁴ and the particular instance, and who usually makes a poor show at argument. Sometimes the abstract conceiver's way is better, sometimes that of the man of instinct. But just as in our study of reasoning we found it impossible to lay down any mark whereby to distinguish right conception of a concrete case from confusion (see pp. 336, 350), so here we can give no general rule for deciding when it is morally useful to treat a concrete case as sui generis, and when to lump it with others in an abstract class.35

An adequate treatment of the way in which we come by our æsthetic and moral judgments would require a separate chapter, which I cannot conveniently include in this book. Suffice it that these judgments express inner harmonies and discords between objects of thought; and that whilst outer cohesions frequently repeated will often seem harmonious, all harmonies are not thus engendered, but our feeling of many of them is a secondary and incidental function of the mind. Where harmonies are asserted of the real world, they are obviously mere postulates of rationality, so far as they transcend⁵ experience. Such postulates are exemplified by the ethical propositions that the individual and universal good are one, and that happiness and goodness are bound to coalesce in the same subject.
Summary of What Precedes.

I will now sum up our progress so far by a short summary of the most important conclusions which we have reached.

The mind has a native structure in this sense, that certain of its objects, if considered together in certain ways, give definite results; and that no other ways of considering, and no other results, are possible if the same objects be taken.

The results are 'relations' which are all expressed by judgments of subsumption and of comparison.

The judgments of subsumption are themselves subsumed under the laws of logic.

Those of comparison are expressed in classifications, and in the sciences of arithmetic and geometry.

Mr. Spencer's opinion that our consciousness of classificatory, logical, and mathematical relations between ideas is due to the frequency with which the corresponding 'outer relations' have impressed our minds, is unintelligible.

Our consciousness of these relations, no doubt, has a natural genesis. But it is to be sought rather in the inner forces which have made the brain grow, than in any mere paths of 'frequent' association which outer stimuli may have ploughed in that organ.

But let our sense for these relations have arisen as it may, the relations themselves form a fixed system of lines of cleavage, so to speak, in the mind, by which we naturally pass from one object to another; and the objects connected by these lines of cleavage are often not connected by any regular time- and space-associations. We distinguish, therefore, between the empirical order of things, and this their rational order of comparison; and, so far as possible, we seek to translate the former into the latter, as being the more congenial of the two to our intellect.

Any classification of things into kinds (especially if the kinds form series, or if they successively involve each other) is a more rational way of conceiving the things than is that mere juxtaposition²⁸⁵ or separation of them as individuals in time and space which is the order of their crude perception. Any assimilation of things to terms between which such classificatory relations, with their remote and mediate transactions, obtain, is a way of bringing the things into a more rational scheme.

Solids in motion are such terms; and the mechanical philosophy is only a way of conceiving nature so as to arrange its items along some of the more natural lines of cleavage of our mental structure.

Other natural lines are the moral and æsthetic relations. Philosophy is still seeking to conceive things so that these relations also may seem to obtain between them.

As long as things have not successfully been so conceived, the moral and æsthetic relations obtain only between entia rationis, terms in the mind; and the moral and æsthetic principles remain but postulates, not propositions, with regard to the real world outside.

There is thus a large body of a priori or intuitively necessary truths. As a rule, these are truths of comparison only, and in the first instance they express relations between merely mental terms. Nature, however, acts as if some of her realities were identical with these mental terms. So far as she does this, we can make a priori propositions concerning natural fact. The aim of both science and philosophy is to make the identifiable terms more numerous. So far it has proved easier to identify nature's things with mental terms of the mechanical than with mental terms of the sentimental order.

The widest postulate of rationality is that the world is rationally intelligible throughout, after the pattern of some ideal system. The whole war of the philosophies is over that point of faith. Some say they can see their way already to the rationality; others that it is hopeless in any other but the mechanical way. To some the very fact that there is a world at all seems irrational³²⁰. Nonentity³⁴⁶ would be a more natural thing than existence, for these minds. One philosopher at least says that the relatedness of things to each other is irrational anyhow, and that a world of relations can never be made intelligible.36

With this I may be assumed to have completed the programme which I announced at the beginning of the chapter, so far as the theoretic part of our organic mental structure goes. It can be due neither to our own nor to our ancestors' experience. I now pass to those practical parts of our organic mental structure. Things are a little different here; and our conclusion, though it lies in the same direction, can be by no means as confidently expressed.

To be as short and simple as possible, I will take the case of instincts, and, supposing the reader to be familiar with Chapter XXIV, I will plunge³⁴⁷ in medias res.
The Origin of Instincts.

Instincts must have been either

1) Each specially³⁴⁵ created in complete form, or

2) Gradually evolved.

As the first alternative is nowadays obsolete³⁴⁸, I proceed directly to the second. The two most prominent suggestions as to the way in which instincts may have been evolved are associated with the names of Lamarck and Darwin.

Lamarck's statement is that animals have wants, and contract, to satisfy them, habits which transform themselves gradually into so many propensities³⁴⁹ which they can neither resist nor change. These propensities, once acquired, propagate themselves by way of transmission to the young, so that they come to exist in new individuals, anteriorly³⁵⁰ to all exercise. Thus are the same emotions, the same habits, the same instincts, perpetuated³⁵¹ without variation from one generation to another, so long as the outward conditions of existence remain the same.37 Mr. Lewes calls this the theory of 'lapsed³⁵² intelligence.' Mr. Spencer's words are clearer than Lamarck's, so that I will quote from him:38

"Setting out with the unquestionable assumption, that every new form of emotion making its appearance in the individual or the race is a modification of some pre-existing emotion, or a compounding of several pre-existing emotions, we should be greatly aided by knowing what always are the pre-existing emotions. When, for example, we find that very few, if any, of the lower animals show any love of accumulation, and that this feeling is absent in infancy³⁵³; when we see that an infant in arms exhibits anger, fear, wonder, while yet it manifests no desire of permanent possession; and that a brute¹⁴⁵ which has no acquisitive emotion can nevertheless feel attachment³⁵⁴, jealousy³⁵⁵, love of approbation, -- we may suspect that the feeling which property satisfies is compounded out of simpler and deeper feelings. We may conclude that as when a dog hides a bone there must exist in him a prospective³⁵⁶ gratification of hunger, so there must similarly, at first, in all cases where anything is secured or taken possession of, exist an ideal excitement of the feeling which that thing will gratify. We may further conclude that when the intelligence is such that a variety of objects come to be utilized³⁵⁷ for different purposes; when, as among savages, divers¹⁸⁹ wants are satisfied through the articles appropriated for weapons, shelter, clothing, ornament³⁵⁸, -- the act of appropriating comes to be one constantly involving agreeable associations, and one which is therefore pleasurable, irrespective of the end subserved. And when, as in civilized³⁵⁹ life, the property acquired is of a kind not conducing to one order of gratifications, but is capable of ministering to all gratifications, the pleasure of acquiring property grows more distinct from each of the various pleasures subserved -- is more completely differentiated³⁶⁰ into a separate emotion.39 It is well known that on newly-discovered islands not inhabited by man, birds are so devoid³⁶¹ of fear as to allow themselves to be knocked over with sticks, but that in the course of generations they acquire such a dread of man as to fly on his approach, and that this dread is manifested by young as well as old. Now unless this change be ascribed to the killing³⁶² off of the least fearful, and the preservation and multiplication of the more fearful, which, considering the small number killed by man, is an inadequate³⁶³ cause, it must be ascribed to accumulated experiences, and each experience must be held to have a share in producing it. We must conclude that in each bird that escapes with injuries inflicted³⁶⁴ by man, or is alarmed by the outcries of other members of the flock, . . . there is established an association of ideas between the human aspect and the pains, direct and indirect, suffered from human agency. And we must further conclude that the state of consciousness which impels³⁶⁵ the bird to take flight is at first nothing more than an ideal reproduction of those painful impressions which before followed man's approach; that such ideal reproduction becomes more vivid and more massive as the painful experiences, direct or sympathetic, increase; and that thus the emotion, in its incipient state, is nothing else than an aggregation³⁶⁶ of the revived pains before experienced. As, in the course of generations, the young birds of this race begin to display a fear of man before they have been injured by him, it is an unavoidable inference that the nervous system of the race has been organically modified by these experiences; we have no choice but to conclude that when a young bird is thus led to fly, it is because the impression produced on its senses by the approaching man entails³⁶⁷, through an incipiently³⁶⁸ reflex action, a partial excitement of all those nerves which, in its ancestors, had been excited under the like conditions; that this partial excitement has its accompanying painful consciousness; and that the vague painful consciousness thus arising constitutes emotion proper -- emotion, undecomposable into specific experiences, and therefore seemingly homogeneous. If such be the explanation of the fact in this case, then it is in all cases. If the emotion is so generated here, then it is so generated throughout. If so, we must perforce conclude that the emotional modifications³⁶⁹ displayed by different nations, and those higher emotions by which civilized are distinguished³⁷⁰ from savage, are to be accounted for on the same principle. And, concluding this, we are led strongly to suspect that the emotions in general have severally thus originated."40

Obviously the word 'emotion' here means instinct as well, -- the actions we call instinctive are expressions or manifestations³⁷¹ of the emotions whose genesis Mr. Spencer describes. Now if habit could thus bear fruit outside the individual life, and if the modifications so painfully acquired by the parents' nervous systems could be found ready-made at birth in those of the young, it would be hard to overestimate³⁷² the importance, both practical and theoretical, of such an extension of its sway. In principle, instincts would then be assimilated to 'secondarily-automatic' habits, and the origin of many of them out of tentative experiments made during ancestral lives, perfected by repetition, addition, and association through successive generations, would be a comparatively simple thing to understand.

Contemporary students of instinct have accordingly been alert to discover all the facts which would seem to establish the possibility of such an explanation. The list is not very long, considering what a burden of conclusions it has to bear. Let acquisitiveness and fear of man, as just argued for by Spencer, lead it off. Other cases of the latter sort are the increased shyness of the woodcock noticed to have occurred within sixty years' observation by Mr. T. A. Knight³⁷³, and the greater shyness everywhere shown by large than by small birds, to which Darwin has called attention.

Then we may add --

The propensities of 'pointing,' 'retrieving,' etc., in sporting dogs, which seem partly, at any rate, to be due to training, but which in well-bred stock are all but innate. It is in these breeds considered bad for a litter of young if its sire or dam have not been trained in the field.

Docility³⁷⁴ of domestic breeds of horses and cattle.

Tameness of young of tame rabbit -- young wild rabbits being invincibly timid.

Young foxes are most wary³⁷⁵ in those places where they are most severely³⁷⁶ hunted.

Wild ducks, hatched out by tame ones, fly off. But if kept close for some generations, the young are said to become tame.41

Young savages at a certain age will revert¹⁸⁶ to the woods.

English greyhounds taken to the high plateau of Mexico could not at first run well, on account of rarefied air. Their whelps entirely got over the difficulty.

Mr. Lewes somewhere42 tells of a terrier pup whose parents had been taught to 'beg,' and who constantly threw himself spontaneously into the begging attitude. Darwin tells of a French orphan-child, brought up out of France, yet shrugging like his ancestors.43

Musical ability often increases from generation to generation in the families of musicians.

The hereditarily³⁷⁷ epileptic guinea-pigs of Brown-Séquard, whose parents had become epileptic through surgical³⁷⁸ operations on the spinal³⁷⁹ cord or sciatic nerve. The adults often lose some of their hind³⁸⁰ toes, and the young, in addition to being epileptic, are frequently born with the corresponding toes lacking. The offspring of guinea-pigs whose cervical sympathetic nerve has been cut on one side will have the ear larger, the eyeball smaller, etc., just like their parents after the operation. Puncture³⁸¹ of the 'restiform body' of the medulla will, in the same animal, congest and enlarge one eye, and cause gangrene of one ear. In the young of such parents the same symptoms occur.

Physical refinement³⁸², delicate hands and feet, etc., appear in families well-bred and rich for several generations.

The 'nervous' temperament³⁸³ also develops in the descendants of sedentary brain-working people.

Inebriates³⁸⁴ produce offspring in various ways degenerate³⁸⁵.

Nearsightedness is produced by indoor occupation for generations. It has been found in Europe much more frequent among schoolchildren in towns than among children of the same age in the country.

These latter cases are of the inheritance of structural³⁸⁶ rather than of functional³⁸⁷ peculiarities. But as structure gives rise to function it may be said that the principle is the same. Amongst other inheritances of adaptive44 structural change may be mentioned:

The 'Yankee' type.

Scrofula, rickets³⁸⁸, and other diseases of bad conditions of life.

The udders and permanent milk of the domestic breeds of cow.

The 'fancy' rabbit's ears, drooping³⁸⁹ through lack of need to erect³⁹⁰ them. Dog's, ass's, etc., in some breeds ditto.

The obsolete eyes of mole⁹⁵ and various cave-dwelling animals.

The diminished size of the wing-bones of domesticated³⁹¹ ducks, due to ancestral disuse of flight.45

These are about all the facts which, by one author or another, have been invoked as evidence in favor of the 'lapsed intelligence' theory of the origin of instincts.

Mr. Darwin's theory is that of the natural selection of accidentally produced tendencies to action.

"It would," says he, "be the most serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation, and then transmitted by inheritance in succeeding generations. It can clearly be shown that the most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not possibly have been thus acquired.46 It will be universally admitted that instincts are as important as corporeal³⁹² structure for the welfare of each species, under its present conditions of life. Under changed conditions of life, it is at least possible that slight modifications of instinct might be profitable to a species; and if it can be shown that instincts do vary ever so little, then I can see no difficulty in natural selection preserving and continually accumulating variations of instinct to any extent that may be profitable. It is thus, as I believe, that all the most complex and wonderful instincts have arisen. . . . I believe that the effects of habit are of quite subordinate importance to the effects of the natural selection of what may be called accidental variations of instincts; -- that is, of variations produced by the same unknown causes which produce slight deviations³⁹³ of bodily structure."47

The evidence for Mr. Darwin's view is too complex to be given in this place. To my own mind it is quite convincing. If, with the Darwinian theory in mind, one re-reads the list of examples given in favor of the Lamarckian theory, one finds that many of the cases are irrelevant, and that some make for one side as well as for the other. This is so obvious in many of the cases that it is needless to point it out in detail. The shrugging child and the begging pup, e.g., prove somewhat too much. They are examples so unique as to suggest spontaneous variation rather than inherited habit. In other cases the observations much need corroboration³⁹⁴, e.g., the effects of not training for a generation in sporting dogs and race-horses, the difference between young wild rabbits born in captivity³⁹⁵ and young tame ones, the cumulative effect of many generations of captivity on wild ducks, etc.

Similarly, the increased wariness³⁹⁶ of the large birds, of those on islands frequented by men, of the woodcock, of the foxes, may be due to the fact that the bolder families have been killed off, and left none but the naturally timid behind, or simply to the individual experience of older birds being imparted by example to the young so that a new educational tradition has occurred. -- The cases of physical refinement, nervous temperament, Yankee type, etc., also need much more discriminating treatment than they have yet received from the Lamarckians. There is no real evidence that physical refinement and nervosity tend to accumulate from generation to generation in aristocratic or intellectual families; nor is there any that the change in that direction which Europeans transplanted to America undergo is not all completed in the first generation of children bred on our soil. To my mind, the facts all point that way. Similarly the better breathing of the grey-hounds born in Mexico was surely due to a post-natal adaptation of the pups' thorax to the rarer air.

Distinct neurotic³⁹⁷ degeneration may undoubtedly³⁹⁸ accumulate from parent to child, and as the parent usually in this case grows worse by his own irregular habits of life, the temptation lies near to ascribe the child's deterioration³⁹⁹ to this cause. This, again, is a hasty conclusion. For neurotic degeneration is unquestionably a disease whose original causes are unknown; and like other 'accidental variations' it is hereditary. But it ultimately ends in sterility; and it seems to me quite unfair to draw any conclusions from its natural history in favor of the transmission of acquired peculiarities. Nor does the degeneration of the children of alcoholics⁴⁰⁰ prove anything in favor of their having inherited the shattered nervous system which the alcohol has induced in their parents: because the poison usually has a chance to directly affect their own bodies before birth, by acting on the germinal matter from which they are formed whilst it is still nourished by the alcoholized blood of the parent. In many cases, however, the parental⁴⁰¹ alcoholics are themselves degenerates⁴⁰² neurotically⁴⁰³, and the drink-habit is only a symptom of their disease, which in some form or other they also propagate to their children.

There remain the inherited mutilations of the guinea-pig. But these are such startling exceptions to the ordinary rule with animals that they should hardly be used as examples of a typical process. The docility of domestic cattle is certainly in part due to man's selection, etc., etc. In a word, the proofs form rather a beggarly array.

Add to this that the writers who have tried to carry out the theory of transmitted habit with any detail are always obliged somewhere to admit inexplicable variation. Thus Spencer allows that

"Sociality can begin only where, through some slight variation, there is less tendency than usual for the individuals to disperse⁴⁰⁴. . . . That slight variations of mental nature, sufficient to initiate⁴⁰⁵ this process, may be fairly assumed, all our domestic animals show us: differences in their characters and likings are conspicuous⁴⁰⁶ Sociality having thus commenced, and survival of the fittest tending ever to maintain and increase it, it will be further strengthened by the inherited effects of habit.'48 Again, in writing of the pleasure of pity, Mr. Spencer says: "This feeling is not one that has arisen through the inherited effects of experiences, but belongs to a quite different group, traceable to the survival of the fittest simply -- to the natural selection of incidental variations. In this group are included all the bodily appetites, together with those simpler instincts, sexual and parental, by which every race is maintained; and which must exist before the higher processes of mental evolution can commence."49

The inheritance of tricks of manner and trifling⁴⁰⁷ peculiarities, such as handwriting, certain odd gestures when pleased, peculiar movements during sleep, etc., have also been quoted in favor of the theory of transmission of acquired habits. Strangely enough; for of all things in the world these tricks seem most like idiosyncratic variations. They are usually defects or oddities which the education of the individual, the pressure of what is really acquired by him, would counteract⁴⁰⁸, but which are too native to be repressed, and breaks through all artificial barriers, in his children as well as in himself.

I leave my text practically just as it was written in 1885. I proceeded at that time to draw a tentative conclusion to the effect that the origin of most of our instincts must certainly be deemed fruits of the back-door method of genesis, and not of ancestral experience in the proper meaning of the term. Whether acquired ancestral habits played any part at all in their production was still an open question in which it would be as rash to affirm as to deny. Already before that time, however, Professor Weismann of Freiburg had begun a very serious attack upon the Lamarckian theory,50 and his polemic⁴⁰⁹ has at last excited such a widespread interest among naturalists that the whilom almost unhesitatingly accepted theory seems almost on the point of being abandoned.

I will therefore add some of Weismann's criticisms of the supposed evidence to my own. In the first place, he has a captivating theory of descent of his own,51 which makes him think it a priori impossible that any peculiarity acquired during lifetime by the parent should be transmitted to the germ. Into the nature of that theory this is not the place to go. Suffice to say that it has made him a keener critic of Lamarck's and Spencer's theory then he otherwise might have been. The only way in which the germinal products can be influenced whilst in the body of the parent is, according to Weismann, by good or bad nutrition. Through this they may degenerate in various ways or lose vitality⁴¹⁰ altogether. They may also be infected through the blood by small-pox, syphilis, or other virulent⁴¹¹ diseases, and otherwise be poisoned. But peculiarities of neural structure and habit in the parents which the parents themselves were not born with, they can never acquire unless perhaps accidentally through some coincidental variation of their own. Accidental variations develop of course into idiosyncrasies which tend to pass to later generations in virtue⁴¹² of the well-known law which no one doubts.

Referring to the often-heard assertion that the increase of talent found in certain families from one generation to another is due to the transmitted effects of exercise of the faculty concerned (the Bachs, the Bernoullis, Mozart, etc.), he sensibly remarks, that the talent being kept in exercise, it ought to have gone on growing for an indefinite number of generations. As a matter of fact, it quickly reaches a maximum, and then we hear no more of it, which is what happens always when an idiosyncrasy is exposed to the effects of miscellaneous intermarriage.

The hereditary epilepsy and other degenerations of the operated guinea-pigs are explained by Professor Weismann as results of infection of the young by the parent's blood. The latter he supposes to undergo a pathologic change in consequence of the original traumatic injury. The obsolescence⁴¹³ of disused organs he explains very satisfactorily, without invoking⁴¹⁴ any transmission of the direct effects of disuse, by his theory of panmixy, for which I must refer to his own writings. Finally, he criticises searchingly the stories we occasionally hear of inherited mutilations in animals (dogs' ears and tails, etc.), and cites a prolonged series of experiments of his own on mice, which he bred for many generations, cutting off both parental tails each time, without interfering⁴¹⁵ in the least with the length of tail with which the young continued to be born.

The strongest argument, after all, in favor of the Lamarckian theory remains the a priori one urged by Spencer in his little work (much the solidest thing, by the way, which he has ever written) 'The Factors of Organic Evolution.' Since, says Mr. Spencer, the accidental variations of all parts of the body are independent of each other, if the entire organization of animals mere due to such accidental variations alone, the amount of mutual adaptation and harmony that we now find there could hardly possibly have come about in any finite time. We must rather suppose that the divers varying parts brought the other parts into harmony with themselves by exercising them ad hoc, and that the effects of the exercise remained and were passed on to the young. This forms, of course, a great presumption⁴¹⁶ against the all-sufficiency of the view of selection of accidental variations exclusively. But it must be admitted that in favor of the contrary view, that adaptive changes are inherited, we have as yet perhaps not one single unequivocal item of positive proof.

I must therefore end this chapter on the genesis of our mental structure by reaffirming my conviction that the so-called Experience-philosophy has failed to prove its point. No more if we take ancestral experiences into account than if we limit ourselves to those of the individual after birth, can we believe that the couplings of terms within the mind are simple copies of corresponding couplings impressed upon it by the environment. This indeed is true of a small part of our cognitions. But so far as logical and mathematical, ethical, æsthetical, and metaphysical propositions go, such an assertion is not only untrue but altogether unintelligible; for these propositions say nothing about the time- and space-order of things, and it is hard to understand how such shallow and vague accounts of them as Mill's and Spencer's could ever have been given by thinking men.

The causes of our mental structure are doubtless natural, and connected, like all our other peculiarities, with those of our nervous structure. Our interests, our tendencies of attention, our motor impulses, the æsthetic, moral, and theoretic combinations we delight in, the extent of our power of apprehending schemes of relation, just like the elementary relations themselves, time, space, difference and similarity, and the elementary kinds of feeling, have all grown up in ways of which at present we can give no account. Even in the clearest parts of Psychology our insight is insignificant⁴¹⁷ enough. And the more sincerely one seeks to trace the actual course of psychogenesis, the steps by which as a race we may have come by the peculiar mental attributes which we possess, the more clearly one perceives "the slowly gathering⁴¹⁸ twilight⁴¹⁹ close in utter night."

1 ascertain   

vt.发现，确定，查明，弄清

参考例句：

• It's difficult to ascertain the coal deposits.煤储量很难探明。
• We must ascertain the responsibility in light of different situtations.我们必须根据不同情况判定责任。

2 pro   

n.赞成，赞成的意见，赞成者

参考例句：

• The two debating teams argued the question pro and con.辩论的两组从赞成与反对两方面辩这一问题。
• Are you pro or con nuclear disarmament?你是赞成还是反对核裁军？

3 dubious   

adj.怀疑的，无把握的；有问题的，靠不住的

参考例句：

• What he said yesterday was dubious.他昨天说的话很含糊。
• He uses some dubious shifts to get money.他用一些可疑的手段去赚钱。

4 coup   

n.政变；突然而成功的行动

参考例句：

• The monarch was ousted by a military coup.那君主被军事政变者废黜了。
• That government was overthrown in a military coup three years ago.那个政府在3年前的军事政变中被推翻。

5 transcend   

vt.超出，超越(理性等)的范围

参考例句：

• We can't transcend the limitations of the ego.我们无法超越自我的局限性。
• Everyone knows that the speed of airplanes transcend that of ships.人人都知道飞机的速度快于轮船的速度。

6 evolutionary   

adj.进化的；演化的，演变的；[生]进化论的

参考例句：

• Life has its own evolutionary process.生命有其自身的进化过程。
• These are fascinating questions to be resolved by the evolutionary studies of plants.这些十分吸引人的问题将在研究植物进化过程中得以解决。

7 instinctive   

adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的

参考例句：

• He tried to conceal his instinctive revulsion at the idea.他试图饰盖自己对这一想法本能的厌恶。
• Animals have an instinctive fear of fire.动物本能地怕火。

8 irresistible   

adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的

参考例句：

• The wheel of history rolls forward with an irresistible force.历史车轮滚滚向前，势不可挡。
• She saw an irresistible skirt in the store window.她看见商店的橱窗里有一条叫人着迷的裙子。

9 judgment   

n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见

参考例句：

• The chairman flatters himself on his judgment of people.主席自认为他审视人比别人高明。
• He's a man of excellent judgment.他眼力过人。

10 judgments   

判断( judgment的名词复数 )； 鉴定； 评价； 审判

参考例句：

• A peculiar austerity marked his judgments of modern life. 他对现代生活的批评带着一种特殊的苛刻。
• He is swift with his judgments. 他判断迅速。

11 akin   

adj.同族的，类似的

参考例句：

• She painted flowers and birds pictures akin to those of earlier feminine painters.她画一些同早期女画家类似的花鸟画。
• Listening to his life story is akin to reading a good adventure novel.听他的人生故事犹如阅读一本精彩的冒险小说。

12 kin   

n.家族，亲属，血缘关系；adj.亲属关系的，同类的

参考例句：

• He comes of good kin.他出身好。
• She has gone to live with her husband's kin.她住到丈夫的亲戚家里去了。

13 intercourse   

n.性交；交流，交往，交际

参考例句：

• The magazine becomes a cultural medium of intercourse between the two peoples.该杂志成为两民族间文化交流的媒介。
• There was close intercourse between them.他们过往很密。

14 fixed   

adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的

参考例句：

• Have you two fixed on a date for the wedding yet?你们俩选定婚期了吗？
• Once the aim is fixed,we should not change it arbitrarily.目标一旦确定，我们就不应该随意改变。

15 innate   

adj.天生的，固有的，天赋的

参考例句：

• You obviously have an innate talent for music.你显然有天生的音乐才能。
• Correct ideas are not innate in the mind.人的正确思想不是自己头脑中固有的。

16 subjective   

a.主观(上)的，个人的

参考例句：

• The way they interpreted their past was highly subjective. 他们解释其过去的方式太主观。
• A literary critic should not be too subjective in his approach. 文学评论家的看法不应太主观。

17 slumber   

n.睡眠，沉睡状态

参考例句：

• All the people in the hotels were wrapped in deep slumber.住在各旅馆里的人都已进入梦乡。
• Don't wake him from his slumber because he needs the rest.不要把他从睡眠中唤醒，因为他需要休息。

18 eternity   

n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷

参考例句：

• The dull play seemed to last an eternity.这场乏味的剧似乎演个没完没了。
• Finally,Ying Tai and Shan Bo could be together for all of eternity.英台和山伯终能双宿双飞，永世相随。

19 purely   

adv.纯粹地，完全地

参考例句：

• I helped him purely and simply out of friendship.我帮他纯粹是出于友情。
• This disproves the theory that children are purely imitative.这证明认为儿童只会单纯地模仿的理论是站不住脚的。

20 acting   

n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的

参考例句：

• Ignore her,she's just acting.别理她，她只是假装的。
• During the seventies,her acting career was in eclipse.在七十年代，她的表演生涯黯然失色。

21 originality   

n.创造力，独创性；新颖

参考例句：

• The name of the game in pop music is originality.流行音乐的本质是独创性。
• He displayed an originality amounting almost to genius.他显示出近乎天才的创造性。

22 warfare   

n.战争(状态)；斗争；冲突

参考例句：

• He addressed the audience on the subject of atomic warfare.他向听众演讲有关原子战争的问题。
• Their struggle consists mainly in peasant guerrilla warfare.他们的斗争主要是农民游击战。

23 awakened   

v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到

参考例句：

• She awakened to the sound of birds singing. 她醒来听到鸟的叫声。
• The public has been awakened to the full horror of the situation. 公众完全意识到了这一状况的可怕程度。 来自《简明英汉词典》

24 awaken   

vi.醒，觉醒；vt.唤醒，使觉醒，唤起，激起

参考例句：

• Old people awaken early in the morning.老年人早晨醒得早。
• Please awaken me at six.请于六点叫醒我。

25 shuffling   

adj. 慢慢移动的, 滑移的 动词shuffle的现在分词形式

参考例句：

• Don't go shuffling along as if you were dead. 别像个死人似地拖着脚走。 来自英汉文学 - 嘉莉妹妹
• Some one was shuffling by on the sidewalk. 外面的人行道上有人拖着脚走过。 来自英汉文学 - 嘉莉妹妹

26 exertions   

n.努力( exertion的名词复数 )；费力；（能力、权力等的）运用；行使

参考例句：

• As long as they lived, exertions would not be necessary to her. 只要他们活着，是不需要她吃苦的。 来自辞典例句
• She failed to unlock the safe in spite of all her exertions. 她虽然费尽力气，仍未能将那保险箱的锁打开。 来自辞典例句

27 undoes   

松开( undo的第三人称单数 )； 解开； 毁灭； 败坏

参考例句：

• Undoes the last action or a sequence of actions, which are displayed in the Undo list. 撤消上一个操作或者一系列操作，这些操作显示在“撤消”列表中。

28 standing   

n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的

参考例句：

• After the earthquake only a few houses were left standing.地震过后只有几幢房屋还立着。
• They're standing out against any change in the law.他们坚决反对对法律做任何修改。

29 encumbered   

v.妨碍，阻碍，拖累( encumber的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The police operation was encumbered by crowds of reporters. 警方的行动被成群的记者所妨碍。
• The narrow quay was encumbered by hundreds of carts. 狭窄的码头被数百辆手推车堵得水泄不通。 来自辞典例句

30 wrought   

v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的

参考例句：

• Events in Paris wrought a change in British opinion towards France and Germany.巴黎发生的事件改变了英国对法国和德国的看法。
• It's a walking stick with a gold head wrought in the form of a flower.那是一个金质花形包头的拐杖。

31 legitimate   

adj.合法的，合理的，合乎逻辑的；v.使合法

参考例句：

• Sickness is a legitimate reason for asking for leave.生病是请假的一个正当的理由。
• That's a perfectly legitimate fear.怀有这种恐惧完全在情理之中。

32 psychology   

n.心理，心理学，心理状态

参考例句：

• She has a background in child psychology.她受过儿童心理学的教育。
• He studied philosophy and psychology at Cambridge.他在剑桥大学学习哲学和心理学。

33 emphatic   

adj.强调的，着重的；无可置疑的，明显的

参考例句：

• Their reply was too emphatic for anyone to doubt them.他们的回答很坚决，不容有任何人怀疑。
• He was emphatic about the importance of being punctual.他强调严守时间的重要性。

34 quotation   

n.引文，引语，语录；报价，牌价，行情

参考例句：

• He finished his speech with a quotation from Shakespeare.他讲话结束时引用了莎士比亚的语录。
• The quotation is omitted here.此处引文从略。

35 cohesion   

n.团结，凝结力

参考例句：

• I had to bring some cohesion into the company.我得使整个公司恢复凝聚力。
• The power of culture is deeply rooted in the vitality,creativity and cohesion of a nation. 文化的力量，深深熔铸在民族的生命力、创造力和凝聚力之中。

36 persistence   

n.坚持，持续，存留

参考例句：

• The persistence of a cough in his daughter puzzled him.他女儿持续的咳嗽把他难住了。
• He achieved success through dogged persistence.他靠着坚持不懈取得了成功。

37 persistences   

坚持不懈( persistence的名词复数 )； 执意； 持续； 留存

参考例句：

38 phenomena   

n.现象

参考例句：

• Ade couldn't relate the phenomena with any theory he knew.艾德无法用他所知道的任何理论来解释这种现象。
• The object of these experiments was to find the connection,if any,between the two phenomena.这些实验的目的就是探索这两种现象之间的联系，如果存在着任何联系的话。

39 insufficient   

adj.(for，of)不足的，不够的

参考例句：

• There was insufficient evidence to convict him.没有足够证据给他定罪。
• In their day scientific knowledge was insufficient to settle the matter.在他们的时代，科学知识还不能足以解决这些问题。

40 nay   

adv.不；n.反对票，投反对票者

参考例句：

• He was grateful for and proud of his son's remarkable,nay,unique performance.他为儿子出色的，不，应该是独一无二的表演心怀感激和骄傲。
• Long essays,nay,whole books have been written on this.许多长篇大论的文章，不，应该说是整部整部的书都是关于这件事的。

41 psychic   

n.对超自然力敏感的人；adj.有超自然力的

参考例句：

• Some people are said to have psychic powers.据说有些人有通灵的能力。
• She claims to be psychic and to be able to foretell the future.她自称有特异功能，能预知未来。

42 psychical   

adj.有关特异功能现象的；有关特异功能官能的；灵魂的；心灵的

参考例句：

• Conclusion: The Liuhe-lottery does harm to people, s psychical health and should be for bidden. 结论：“六合彩”赌博有害人们心理卫生，应予以严禁。 来自互联网

43 registration   

n.登记，注册，挂号

参考例句：

• Marriage without registration is not recognized by law.法律不承认未登记的婚姻。
• What's your registration number?你挂的是几号？

44 determined   

adj.坚定的；有决心的

参考例句：

• I have determined on going to Tibet after graduation.我已决定毕业后去西藏。
• He determined to view the rooms behind the office.他决定查看一下办公室后面的房间。

45 multiplication   

n.增加，增多，倍增；增殖，繁殖；乘法

参考例句：

• Our teacher used to drum our multiplication tables into us.我们老师过去老是让我们反覆背诵乘法表。
• The multiplication of numbers has made our club building too small.会员的增加使得我们的俱乐部拥挤不堪。

46 infinity   

n.无限，无穷，大量

参考例句：

• It is impossible to count up to infinity.不可能数到无穷大。
• Theoretically,a line can extend into infinity.从理论上来说直线可以无限地延伸。

47 consolidation   

n.合并,巩固

参考例句：

• The denser population necessitates closer consolidation both for internal and external action. 住得日益稠密的居民，对内和对外都不得不更紧密地团结起来。 来自英汉非文学 - 家庭、私有制和国家的起源
• The state ensures the consolidation and growth of the state economy. 国家保障国营经济的巩固和发展。 来自汉英非文学 - 中国宪法

48 habitual   

adj.习惯性的；通常的，惯常的

参考例句：

• He is a habitual criminal.他是一个惯犯。
• They are habitual visitors to our house.他们是我家的常客。

49 entail   

vt.使承担，使成为必要，需要

参考例句：

• Such a decision would entail a huge political risk.这样的决定势必带来巨大的政治风险。
• This job would entail your learning how to use a computer.这工作将需要你学会怎样用计算机。

50 hereditary   

adj.遗传的，遗传性的，可继承的，世袭的

参考例句：

• The Queen of England is a hereditary ruler.英国女王是世袭的统治者。
• In men,hair loss is hereditary.男性脱发属于遗传。

51 persistent   

adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的

参考例句：

• Albert had a persistent headache that lasted for three days.艾伯特连续头痛了三天。
• She felt embarrassed by his persistent attentions.他不时地向她大献殷勤，使她很难为情。

52 cumulative   

adj.累积的，渐增的

参考例句：

• This drug has a cumulative effect.这种药有渐增的效力。
• The benefits from eating fish are cumulative.吃鱼的好处要长期才能显现。

53 consolidated   

a.联合的

参考例句：

• With this new movie he has consolidated his position as the country's leading director. 他新执导的影片巩固了他作为全国最佳导演的地位。
• Those two banks have consolidated and formed a single large bank. 那两家银行已合并成一家大银行。

54 savage   

adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人

参考例句：

• The poor man received a savage beating from the thugs.那可怜的人遭到暴徒的痛打。
• He has a savage temper.他脾气粗暴。

55 aptitudes   

（学习方面的）才能，资质，天资( aptitude的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• They all require special aptitudes combined with special training. 他们都应具有专门技能，并受过专门训练。
• Do program development with passion. has aptitudes for learning. research. innovation. 热爱程序开发工作。具有学习。钻研。创新的精神。

56 ego   

n.自我，自己，自尊

参考例句：

• He is absolute ego in all thing.在所有的事情上他都绝对自我。
• She has been on an ego trip since she sang on television.她上电视台唱过歌之后就一直自吹自擂。

57 reconciliation   

n.和解，和谐，一致

参考例句：

• He was taken up with the reconciliation of husband and wife.他忙于做夫妻间的调解工作。
• Their handshake appeared to be a gesture of reconciliation.他们的握手似乎是和解的表示。

58 doctrine   

n.教义；主义；学说

参考例句：

• He was impelled to proclaim his doctrine.他不得不宣扬他的教义。
• The council met to consider changes to doctrine.宗教议会开会考虑更改教义。

59 antagonist   

n.敌人，对抗者，对手

参考例句：

• His antagonist in the debate was quicker than he.在辩论中他的对手比他反应快。
• The thing is to know the nature of your antagonist.要紧的是要了解你的对手的特性。

60 possessed   

adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的

参考例句：

• He flew out of the room like a man possessed.他像着了魔似地猛然冲出房门。
• He behaved like someone possessed.他行为举止像是魔怔了。

61 pointed   

adj.尖的，直截了当的

参考例句：

• He gave me a very sharp pointed pencil.他给我一支削得非常尖的铅笔。
• She wished to show Mrs.John Dashwood by this pointed invitation to her brother.她想通过对达茨伍德夫人提出直截了当的邀请向她的哥哥表示出来。

62 inexplicable   

adj.无法解释的，难理解的

参考例句：

• It is now inexplicable how that development was misinterpreted.当时对这一事态发展的错误理解究竟是怎么产生的，现在已经无法说清楚了。
• There are many things which are inexplicable by science.有很多事科学还无法解释。

63 physiologist   

n.生理学家

参考例句：

• Russian physiologist who observed conditioned salivary responses in dogs (1849-1936). （1849-1936）苏联生理学家，在狗身上观察到唾液条件反射，曾获1904年诺贝尔生理学-医学奖。
• The physiologist recently studied indicated that evening exercises beneficially. 生理学家新近研究表明，傍晚锻炼最为有益。

64 complexity   

n.复杂(性)，复杂的事物

参考例句：

• Only now did he understand the full complexity of the problem.直到现在他才明白这一问题的全部复杂性。
• The complexity of the road map puzzled me.错综复杂的公路图把我搞糊涂了。

65 cerebral   

adj.脑的，大脑的；有智力的，理智型的

参考例句：

• Your left cerebral hemisphere controls the right-hand side of your body.你的左半脑控制身体的右半身。
• He is a precise,methodical,cerebral man who carefully chooses his words.他是一个一丝不苟、有条理和理智的人，措辞谨慎。

66 subsisting   

v.（靠很少的钱或食物）维持生活，生存下去( subsist的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• Perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human subsisting. 衪是完全的神又是完全的人，且有理性的灵魂和人类血肉之躯。 来自互联网
• The benevolence subsisting in her character draws her friends closer to her. 存在于她性格中的仁慈吸引她的朋友们接近她。 来自互联网

67 sensory   

adj.知觉的，感觉的，知觉器官的

参考例句：

• Human powers of sensory discrimination are limited.人类感官分辨能力有限。
• The sensory system may undergo long-term adaptation in alien environments.感觉系统对陌生的环境可能经过长时期才能适应。

68 nostrils   

鼻孔( nostril的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Her nostrils flared with anger. 她气得两个鼻孔都鼓了起来。
• The horse dilated its nostrils. 马张大鼻孔。

69 faculties   

n.能力( faculty的名词复数 )；全体教职员；技巧；院

参考例句：

• Although he's ninety, his mental faculties remain unimpaired. 他虽年届九旬，但头脑仍然清晰。
• All your faculties have come into play in your work. 在你的工作中，你的全部才能已起到了作用。 来自《简明英汉词典》

70 varied   

adj.多样的，多变化的

参考例句：

• The forms of art are many and varied.艺术的形式是多种多样的。
• The hotel has a varied programme of nightly entertainment.宾馆有各种晚间娱乐活动。

71 cohere   

vt.附着，连贯，一致

参考例句：

• The adornments do not cohere with the basic design.装饰物与设计的基调不协调。
• When you squeeze a handful of snow,the flakes cohere to make a snowball.你把一团雪捏紧，雪就黏合成雪球。

72 faculty   

n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员

参考例句：

• He has a great faculty for learning foreign languages.他有学习外语的天赋。
• He has the faculty of saying the right thing at the right time.他有在恰当的时候说恰当的话的才智。

73 gambols   

v.蹦跳，跳跃，嬉戏( gambol的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

74 utterly   

adv.完全地，绝对地

参考例句：

• Utterly devoted to the people,he gave his life in saving his patients.他忠于人民，把毕生精力用于挽救患者的生命。
• I was utterly ravished by the way she smiled.她的微笑使我完全陶醉了。

75 countable   

adj.可数的，可以计算的

参考例句：

• The word "person" is a countable noun.person这个词是个可数名词。
• Countable nouns have singular and plural forms.可数名词有单数和复数之分。

76 defenders   

n.防御者( defender的名词复数 )；守卫者；保护者；辩护者

参考例句：

• The defenders were outnumbered and had to give in. 抵抗者寡不敌众，只能投降。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• After hard fighting,the defenders were still masters of the city. 守军经过奋战仍然控制着城市。 来自《简明英汉词典》

77 drawn   

v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的

参考例句：

• All the characters in the story are drawn from life.故事中的所有人物都取材于生活。
• Her gaze was drawn irresistibly to the scene outside.她的目光禁不住被外面的风景所吸引。

78 complicates   

使复杂化( complicate的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• What complicates the issue is the burden of history. 历史的重负使问题复杂化了。
• Russia as a great and ambitious power gravely complicates the situation. 俄国作为一个强大而有野心的国家，使得局势异常复杂。

79 savages   

未开化的人，野蛮人( savage的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• There're some savages living in the forest. 森林里居住着一些野人。
• That's an island inhabited by savages. 那是一个野蛮人居住的岛屿。

80 scrutinized   

v.仔细检查，详审( scrutinize的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The jeweler scrutinized the diamond for flaws. 宝石商人仔细察看钻石有无瑕庇 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
• Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessen shop. 我们一起把甜食店里买来的十二块柠檬蛋糕细细打量了一番。 来自英汉文学 - 盖茨比

81 logic   

n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性

参考例句：

• What sort of logic is that?这是什么逻辑？
• I don't follow the logic of your argument.我不明白你的论点逻辑性何在。

82 animated   

adj.生气勃勃的，活跃的，愉快的

参考例句：

• His observations gave rise to an animated and lively discussion.他的言论引起了一场气氛热烈而活跃的讨论。
• We had an animated discussion over current events last evening.昨天晚上我们热烈地讨论时事。

83 loyalty   

n.忠诚，忠心

参考例句：

• She told him the truth from a sense of loyalty.她告诉他真相是出于忠诚。
• His loyalty to his friends was never in doubt.他对朋友的一片忠心从来没受到怀疑。

84 entirely   

ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The fire was entirely caused by their neglect of duty. 那场火灾完全是由于他们失职而引起的。
• His life was entirely given up to the educational work. 他的一生统统献给了教育工作。

85 partisan   

adj.党派性的；游击队的；n.游击队员；党徒

参考例句：

• In their anger they forget all the partisan quarrels.愤怒之中，他们忘掉一切党派之争。
• The numerous newly created partisan detachments began working slowly towards that region.许多新建的游击队都开始慢慢地向那里移动。

86 antediluvian   

adj.史前的，陈旧的

参考例句：

• His ideas are positively antediluvian!他的思想是纯粹的老古董。
• This antediluvian monetary system has now been replaced by the up-to-date monetary system of Japan.这种旧式的金融体系也已经被现代化的日本系统所取代。

87 wholesale   

n.批发；adv.以批发方式；vt.批发，成批出售

参考例句：

• The retail dealer buys at wholesale and sells at retail.零售商批发购进货物，以零售价卖出。
• Such shoes usually wholesale for much less.这种鞋批发出售通常要便宜得多。

88 discipleship   

n.做弟子的身份（期间）

参考例句：

• Teaching the Bible through seminars, workshops, discipleship, home cell groups, and books. 透过举办研讨会、工作坊、门徒训练、家庭小组和出办书籍教导圣经。 来自互联网
• Our popular PP959 radio show and podcast is another example of our integrated discipleship ministry. 我们广受欢迎的[霹啪959]电台广播节目和网上播客也是我们整全门训事工的表表者。 来自互联网

89 recondite   

adj.深奥的，难解的

参考例句：

• Her poems are modishly experimental in style and recondite in subject-matter.她的诗在风格上是时髦的实验派，主题艰深难懂。
• To a craftsman,the ancient article with recondite and scholastic words was too abstruse to understand.可是对一个车轮师父而言，这些之乎者也的文言文是太深而难懂的。

90 perfectly   

adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定。
• Everything that we're doing is all perfectly above board.我们做的每件事情都是光明正大的。

91 animus   

n.恶意；意图

参考例句：

• They are full of animus towords us.他们对我们怀有敌意。
• When you have an animus against a person,you should give it up.当你对别人怀有敌意时，你应当放弃这种想法。

92 idols   

偶像( idol的名词复数 )； 受崇拜的人或物； 受到热爱和崇拜的人或物； 神像

参考例句：

• The genii will give evidence against those who have worshipped idols. 魔怪将提供证据来反对那些崇拜偶像的人。 来自英汉非文学 - 文明史
• Teenagers are very sequacious and they often emulate the behavior of their idols. 青少年非常盲从，经常模仿他们的偶像的行为。

93 opportune   

adj.合适的，适当的

参考例句：

• Her arrival was very opportune.她来得非常及时。
• The timing of our statement is very opportune.我们发表声明选择的时机很恰当。

94 tune   

n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整

参考例句：

• He'd written a tune,and played it to us on the piano.他写了一段曲子，并在钢琴上弹给我们听。
• The boy beat out a tune on a tin can.那男孩在易拉罐上敲出一首曲子。

95 mole   

n.胎块；痣；克分子

参考例句：

• She had a tiny mole on her cheek.她的面颊上有一颗小黑痣。
• The young girl felt very self- conscious about the large mole on her chin.那位年轻姑娘对自己下巴上的一颗大痣感到很不自在。

96 molecules   

分子( molecule的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The structure of molecules can be seen under an electron microscope. 分子的结构可在电子显微镜下观察到。
• Inside the reactor the large molecules are cracked into smaller molecules. 在反应堆里，大分子裂变为小分子。

97 forth   

adv.向前；向外，往外

参考例句：

• The wind moved the trees gently back and forth.风吹得树轻轻地来回摇晃。
• He gave forth a series of works in rapid succession.他很快连续发表了一系列的作品。

98 laborious   

adj.吃力的，努力的，不流畅

参考例句：

• They had the laborious task of cutting down the huge tree.他们接受了伐大树的艰苦工作。
• Ants and bees are laborious insects.蚂蚁与蜜蜂是勤劳的昆虫。

99 alteration   

n.变更，改变；蚀变

参考例句：

• The shirt needs alteration.这件衬衣需要改一改。
• He easily perceived there was an alteration in my countenance.他立刻看出我的脸色和往常有些不同。

100 proceeding   

n.行动，进行，(pl.)会议录，学报

参考例句：

• This train is now proceeding from Paris to London.这次列车从巴黎开往伦敦。
• The work is proceeding briskly.工作很有生气地进展着。

101 morbid   

adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的

参考例句：

• Some people have a morbid fascination with crime.一些人对犯罪有一种病态的痴迷。
• It's morbid to dwell on cemeteries and such like.不厌其烦地谈论墓地以及诸如此类的事是一种病态。

102 dread   

vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧

参考例句：

• We all dread to think what will happen if the company closes.我们都不敢去想一旦公司关门我们该怎么办。
• Her heart was relieved of its blankest dread.她极度恐惧的心理消除了。

103 solitude   

n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方

参考例句：

• People need a chance to reflect on spiritual matters in solitude. 人们需要独处的机会来反思精神上的事情。
• They searched for a place where they could live in solitude. 他们寻找一个可以过隐居生活的地方。

104 peculiarities   

n. 特质, 特性, 怪癖, 古怪

参考例句：

• the cultural peculiarities of the English 英国人的文化特点
• He used to mimic speech peculiarities of another. 他过去总是模仿别人讲话的特点。

105 peculiar   

adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的

参考例句：

• He walks in a peculiar fashion.他走路的样子很奇特。
• He looked at me with a very peculiar expression.他用一种很奇怪的表情看着我。

106 progeny   

n.后代，子孙；结果

参考例句：

• His numerous progeny are scattered all over the country.他为数众多的后代散布在全国各地。
• He was surrounded by his numerous progeny.众多的子孙簇拥着他。

107 molecular   

adj.分子的；克分子的

参考例句：

• The research will provide direct insight into molecular mechanisms.这项研究将使人能够直接地了解分子的机理。
• For the pressure to become zero, molecular bombardment must cease.当压强趋近于零时，分子的碰撞就停止了。

108 modification   

n.修改，改进，缓和，减轻

参考例句：

• The law,in its present form,is unjust;it needs modification.现行的法律是不公正的，它需要修改。
• The design requires considerable modification.这个设计需要作大的修改。

109 immediate   

adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的

参考例句：

• His immediate neighbours felt it their duty to call.他的近邻认为他们有责任去拜访。
• We declared ourselves for the immediate convocation of the meeting.我们主张立即召开这个会议。

110 mediate   

vi.调解，斡旋；vt.经调解解决；经斡旋促成

参考例句：

• The state must mediate the struggle for water resources.政府必须通过调解来解决对水资源的争夺。
• They may be able to mediate between parties with different interests.他们也许能在不同利益政党之间进行斡旋。

111 collateral   

adj.平行的；旁系的；n.担保品

参考例句：

• Many people use personal assets as collateral for small business loans.很多人把个人财产用作小额商业贷款的抵押品。
• Most people here cannot borrow from banks because they lack collateral.由于拿不出东西作为抵押，这里大部分人无法从银行贷款。

112 unstable   

adj.不稳定的，易变的

参考例句：

• This bookcase is too unstable to hold so many books.这书橱很不结实，装不了这么多书。
• The patient's condition was unstable.那患者的病情不稳定。

113 engender   

v.产生，引起

参考例句：

• A policy like that tends to engender a sense of acceptance,and the research literature suggests this leads to greater innovation.一个能够使员工产生认同感的政策，研究表明这会走向更伟大的创新。
• The sense of injustice they engender is a threat to economic and political security.它们造成的不公平感是对经济和政治安全的威胁。

114 engendered   

v.产生（某形势或状况），造成，引起( engender的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The issue engendered controversy. 这个问题引起了争论。
• The meeting engendered several quarrels. 这次会议发生了几次争吵。 来自《简明英汉词典》

115 annul   

v.宣告…无效，取消，废止

参考例句：

• They have the power to alter or annul inappropriate decisions of their own standing committees.他们有权改变或者撤销本级人民代表大会常务委员会不适当的决定。
• The courts later found grounds to annul the results,after the king urged them to sort out the "mess".在国王敦促法庭收拾烂摊子后，法庭随后宣布废除选举结果。

116 annulled   

v.宣告无效( annul的过去式和过去分词 )；取消；使消失；抹去

参考例句：

• Their marriage was annulled after just six months. 他们的婚姻仅过半年就宣告取消。
• Many laws made by the former regime have been annulled. 前政权制定的许多法律被宣布无效。 来自《简明英汉词典》

117 thereby   

adv.因此，从而

参考例句：

• I have never been to that city,,ereby I don't know much about it.我从未去过那座城市，因此对它不怎么熟悉。
• He became a British citizen,thereby gaining the right to vote.他成了英国公民，因而得到了投票权。

118 assailed   

v.攻击( assail的过去式和过去分词 )；困扰；质问；毅然应对

参考例句：

• He was assailed with fierce blows to the head. 他的头遭到猛烈殴打。
• He has been assailed by bad breaks all these years. 这些年来他接二连三地倒霉。 来自《用法词典》

119 mere   

adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过

参考例句：

• That is a mere repetition of what you said before.那不过是重复了你以前讲的话。
• It's a mere waste of time waiting any longer.再等下去纯粹是浪费时间。

120 obstinate   

adj.顽固的，倔强的，不易屈服的，较难治愈的

参考例句：

• She's too obstinate to let anyone help her.她太倔强了，不会让任何人帮她的。
• The trader was obstinate in the negotiation.这个商人在谈判中拗强固执。

121 plodder   

n.沉重行走的人，辛勤工作的人

参考例句：

• He was quiet, conscientious, a bit of a plodder. 他做事闷声不响，小心谨慎，有点死气沉沉的。 来自柯林斯例句

122 scrutiny   

n.详细检查，仔细观察

参考例句：

• His work looks all right,but it will not bear scrutiny.他的工作似乎很好，但是经不起仔细检查。
• Few wives in their forties can weather such a scrutiny.很少年过四十的妻子经得起这么仔细的观察。

123 dependence   

n.依靠，依赖；信任，信赖；隶属

参考例句：

• Doctors keep trying to break her dependence of the drug.医生们尽力使她戒除毒瘾。
• He was freed from financial dependence on his parents.他在经济上摆脱了对父母的依赖。

124 postulate   

n.假定，基本条件；vt.要求，假定

参考例句：

• Let's postulate that she is a cook.我们假定她是一位厨师。
• Freud postulated that we all have a death instinct as well as a life instinct.弗洛伊德曾假定我们所有人都有生存本能和死亡本能。

125 investigation   

n.调查，调查研究

参考例句：

• In an investigation,a new fact became known, which told against him.在调查中新发现了一件对他不利的事实。
• He drew the conclusion by building on his own investigation.他根据自己的调查研究作出结论。

126 snare   

n.陷阱，诱惑，圈套；（去除息肉或者肿瘤的）勒除器；响弦，小军鼓；vt.以陷阱捕获，诱惑

参考例句：

• I used to snare small birds such as sparrows.我曾常用罗网捕捉麻雀等小鸟。
• Most of the people realized that their scheme was simply a snare and a delusion.大多数人都认识到他们的诡计不过是一个骗人的圈套。

127 imprinted   

v.盖印（imprint的过去式与过去分词形式）

参考例句：

• The terrible scenes were indelibly imprinted on his mind. 那些恐怖场面深深地铭刻在他的心中。
• The scene was imprinted on my mind. 那个场面铭刻在我的心中。 来自《简明英汉词典》

128 cognitive   

adj.认知的，认识的，有感知的

参考例句：

• As children grow older,their cognitive processes become sharper.孩子们越长越大，他们的认知过程变得更为敏锐。
• The cognitive psychologist is like the tinker who wants to know how a clock works.认知心理学者倒很像一个需要通晓钟表如何运转的钟表修理匠。

129 kindled   

（使某物）燃烧，着火( kindle的过去式和过去分词 )； 激起（感情等）； 发亮，放光

参考例句：

• We watched as the fire slowly kindled. 我们看着火慢慢地燃烧起来。
• The teacher's praise kindled a spark of hope inside her. 老师的赞扬激起了她内心的希望。

130 frustration   

n.挫折，失败，失效，落空

参考例句：

• He had to fight back tears of frustration.他不得不强忍住失意的泪水。
• He beat his hands on the steering wheel in frustration.他沮丧地用手打了几下方向盘。

131 inevitably   

adv.不可避免地；必然发生地

参考例句：

• In the way you go on,you are inevitably coming apart.照你们这样下去，毫无疑问是会散伙的。
• Technological changes will inevitably lead to unemployment.技术变革必然会导致失业。

132 criticise   

v.批评，评论；非难

参考例句：

• Right and left have much cause to criticise government.左翼和右翼有很多理由批评政府。
• It is not your place to criticise or suggest improvements!提出批评或给予改进建议并不是你的责任！

133 permanently   

adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地

参考例句：

• The accident left him permanently scarred.那次事故给他留下了永久的伤疤。
• The ship is now permanently moored on the Thames in London.该船现在永久地停泊在伦敦泰晤士河边。

134 retracing   

v.折回( retrace的现在分词 )；回忆；回顾；追溯

参考例句：

• We're retracing the route of a deep explorer mission. 我们将折回一个深入的探险路线中去。 来自电影对白
• Retracing my steps was certainly not an option. 回顾我的脚步并不是个办法。 来自互联网

135 neural   

adj.神经的，神经系统的

参考例句：

• The neural network can preferably solve the non- linear problem.利用神经网络建模可以较好地解决非线性问题。
• The information transmission in neural system depends on neurotransmitters.信息传递的神经途径有赖于神经递质。

136 naught   

n.无，零 [=nought]

参考例句：

• He sets at naught every convention of society.他轻视所有的社会习俗。
• I hope that all your efforts won't go for naught.我希望你的努力不会毫无结果。

137 summation   

n.总和；最后辩论

参考例句：

• The exhibition was a summation of his life's work.这次展览汇集了他一生中典型的作品。
• The defense attorney phrased his summation at last.最后，辩护律师作了辩论总结。

138 steer   

vt.驾驶，为…操舵；引导；vi.驾驶

参考例句：

• If you push the car, I'll steer it.如果你来推车，我就来驾车。
• It's no use trying to steer the boy into a course of action that suits you.想说服这孩子按你的方式行事是徒劳的。

139 dealing   

n.经商方法，待人态度

参考例句：

• This store has an excellent reputation for fair dealing.该商店因买卖公道而享有极高的声誉。
• His fair dealing earned our confidence.他的诚实的行为获得我们的信任。

140 intelligible   

adj.可理解的，明白易懂的，清楚的

参考例句：

• This report would be intelligible only to an expert in computing.只有计算机运算专家才能看懂这份报告。
• His argument was barely intelligible.他的论点不易理解。

141 derivatives   

n.衍生性金融商品；派生物，引出物( derivative的名词复数 )；导数

参考例句：

• Many English words are derivatives of Latin words. 许多英语词来自拉丁语。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• These compounds are nitrosohydroxylamine derivatives. 这类合成物是亚硝基羟胺衍生物。 来自辞典例句

142 plausibility   

n. 似有道理, 能言善辩

参考例句：

• We can add further plausibility to the above argument. 我们可以在上述论据之外，再进一步增添一个合理的论据。
• Let us consider the charges she faces, and the legal plausibility of those charges. 让我们考虑一下她面临的指控以及这些指控在法律上的可信性。

143 stimuli   

n.刺激（物）

参考例句：

• It is necessary to curtail or alter normally coexisting stimuli.必需消除或改变正常时并存的刺激。
• My sweat glands also respond to emotional stimuli.我的汗腺对情绪刺激也能产生反应。

144 shrouded   

v.隐瞒( shroud的过去式和过去分词 )；保密

参考例句：

• The hills were shrouded in mist . 这些小山被笼罩在薄雾之中。
• The towers were shrouded in mist. 城楼被蒙上薄雾。 来自《简明英汉词典》

145 brute   

n.野兽，兽性

参考例句：

• The aggressor troops are not many degrees removed from the brute.侵略军简直象一群野兽。
• That dog is a dangerous brute.It bites people.那条狗是危险的畜牲，它咬人。

146 brutes   

兽( brute的名词复数 )； 畜生； 残酷无情的人； 兽性

参考例句：

• They're not like dogs; they're hideous brutes. 它们不像狗，是丑陋的畜牲。
• Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. 突然，他的鼻尖闻到了老鼠的霉臭味。 来自英汉文学

147 tributary   

n.支流；纳贡国；adj.附庸的；辅助的；支流的

参考例句：

• There was a tributary road near the end of the village.村的尽头有条岔道。
• As the largest tributary of Jinsha river,Yalong river is abundant in hydropower resources.雅砻江是金沙江的最大支流，水力资源十分丰富。

148 intelligibly   

adv.可理解地，明了地，清晰地

参考例句：

• The foreigner spoke to us quite intelligibly. 这个外国人对我们讲的话理解很好。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Logically or intelligibly ordered or presented; coherent. 有逻辑或理性地排列或表现的；协调的。 来自互联网

149 formulated   

v.构想出( formulate的过去式和过去分词 )；规划；确切地阐述；用公式表示

参考例句：

• He claims that the writer never consciously formulated his own theoretical position. 他声称该作家从未有意识地阐明他自己的理论见解。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• This idea can be formulated in two different ways. 这个意思可以有两种说法。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

150 materialistic   

a.唯物主义的，物质享乐主义的

参考例句：

• She made him both soft and materialistic. 她把他变成女性化而又实际化。
• Materialistic dialectics is an important part of constituting Marxism. 唯物辩证法是马克思主义的重要组成部分。

151 piecemeal   

adj.零碎的；n.片，块；adv.逐渐地；v.弄成碎块

参考例句：

• A lack of narrative drive leaves the reader with piecemeal vignettes.叙述缺乏吸引力，读者读到的只是一些支离破碎的片段。
• Let's settle the matter at one stroke,not piecemeal.把这事一气儿解决了吧，别零敲碎打了。

152 nucleus   

n.核，核心，原子核

参考例句：

• These young people formed the nucleus of the club.这些年轻人成了俱乐部的核心。
• These councils would form the nucleus of a future regime.这些委员会将成为一个未来政权的核心。

153 detailed   

adj.详细的，详尽的，极注意细节的，完全的

参考例句：

• He had made a detailed study of the terrain.他对地形作了缜密的研究。
• A detailed list of our publications is available on request.我们的出版物有一份详细的目录备索。

154 downwards   

adj./adv.向下的（地），下行的（地）

参考例句：

• He lay face downwards on his bed.他脸向下伏在床上。
• As the river flows downwards,it widens.这条河愈到下游愈宽。

155 generalization   

n.普遍性，一般性，概括

参考例句：

• This sweeping generalization is the law of conservation of energy.这一透彻的概括就是能量守恒定律。
• The evaluation of conduct involves some amount of generalization.对操行的评价会含有一些泛泛之论。

156 egregiously   

adv.过份地，卓越地

参考例句：

• But previous Greek governments egregiously violated those limits. 但之前几届希腊政府都严重违反了这些限制。 来自互联网

157 chaos   

n.混乱，无秩序

参考例句：

• After the failure of electricity supply the city was in chaos.停电后，城市一片混乱。
• The typhoon left chaos behind it.台风后一片混乱。

158 algebra   

n.代数学

参考例句：

• He was not good at algebra in middle school.他中学时不擅长代数。
• The boy can't figure out the algebra problems.这个男孩做不出这道代数题。

159 strictly   

adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地

参考例句：

• His doctor is dieting him strictly.他的医生严格规定他的饮食。
• The guests were seated strictly in order of precedence.客人严格按照地位高低就座。

160 preservation   

n.保护，维护，保存，保留，保持

参考例句：

• The police are responsible for the preservation of law and order.警察负责维持法律与秩序。
• The picture is in an excellent state of preservation.这幅画保存得极为完好。

161 ponderously   

参考例句：

• He turns and marches away ponderously to the right. 他转过身，迈着沉重的步子向右边行进。 来自互联网
• The play was staged with ponderously realistic sets. 演出的舞台以现实环境为背景，很没意思。 来自互联网

162 elimination   

n.排除，消除，消灭

参考例句：

• Their elimination from the competition was a great surprise.他们在比赛中遭到淘汰是个很大的意外。
• I was eliminated from the 400 metres in the semi-finals.我在400米半决赛中被淘汰。

163 rebellious   

adj.造反的，反抗的，难控制的

参考例句：

• They will be in danger if they are rebellious.如果他们造反，他们就要发生危险。
• Her reply was mild enough,but her thoughts were rebellious.她的回答虽然很温和，但她的心里十分反感。

164 assent   

v.批准，认可；n.批准，认可

参考例句：

• I cannot assent to what you ask.我不能应允你的要求。
• The new bill passed by Parliament has received Royal Assent.议会所通过的新方案已获国王批准。

165 demonstration   

n.表明，示范，论证，示威

参考例句：

• His new book is a demonstration of his patriotism.他写的新书是他的爱国精神的证明。
• He gave a demonstration of the new technique then and there.他当场表演了这种新的操作方法。

166 conjectured   

推测，猜测，猜想( conjecture的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The old peasant conjectured that it would be an unusually cold winter. 那老汉推测冬天将会异常地寒冷。
• The general conjectured that the enemy only had about five days' supply of food left. 将军推测敌人只剩下五天的粮食给养。

167 engendering   

v.产生（某形势或状况），造成，引起( engender的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• Certain soluble extracts of B pertussis may prove to be effective without engendering serious side effects. 某些可溶性百日咳杆菌提取物，可证明用之有效，也不产生严重副作用。 来自辞典例句
• The engendering, classification, path and control of environmental pollution transference were discussed. 对环境污染转嫁的产生、分类、途径及其控制与防范进行了分析。 来自互联网

168 mortar   

n.灰浆，灰泥；迫击炮；v.把…用灰浆涂接合

参考例句：

• The mason flushed the joint with mortar.泥工用灰浆把接缝处嵌平。
• The sound of mortar fire seemed to be closing in.迫击炮的吼声似乎正在逼近。

169 random   

adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动

参考例句：

• The list is arranged in a random order.名单排列不分先后。
• On random inspection the meat was found to be bad.经抽查，发现肉变质了。

170 dough   

n.生面团；钱，现款

参考例句：

• She formed the dough into squares.她把生面团捏成四方块。
• The baker is kneading dough.那位面包师在揉面。

171 sediments   

沉淀物( sediment的名词复数 )； 沉积物

参考例句：

• When deposited, 70-80% of the volume of muddy sediments may be water. 泥质沉积物沉积后，体积的70-80％是水。
• Oligocene erosion had truncated the sediments draped over the dome. 覆盖于穹丘上的沉积岩为渐新世侵蚀所截削。

172 aggregates   

数( aggregate的名词复数 )； 总计； 骨料； 集料（可成混凝土或修路等用的）

参考例句：

• Snowflakes are loose aggregates of ice crystals. 雪花是冰晶的松散凝结。
• Our airplanes based in Europe should be included in the aggregates. 我们驻欧飞机应包括在总数内。

173 ruptured   

v.（使）破裂( rupture的过去式和过去分词 )；（使体内组织等）断裂；使（友好关系）破裂；使绝交

参考例句：

• They reported that the pipeline had ruptured. 他们报告说管道已经破裂了。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The wall through Berlin was finally ruptured, prefiguring the reunification of Germany. 柏林墙终于倒塌了，预示着德国的重新统一。 来自辞典例句

174 rupture   

n.破裂；(关系的)决裂；v.(使)破裂

参考例句：

• I can rupture a rule for a friend.我可以为朋友破一次例。
• The rupture of a blood vessel usually cause the mark of a bruise.血管的突然破裂往往会造成外伤的痕迹。

175 peculiarity   

n.独特性，特色；特殊的东西；怪癖

参考例句：

• Each country has its own peculiarity.每个国家都有自己的独特之处。
• The peculiarity of this shop is its day and nigth service.这家商店的特点是昼夜服务。

176 ethical   

adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的

参考例句：

• It is necessary to get the youth to have a high ethical concept.必须使青年具有高度的道德观念。
• It was a debate which aroused fervent ethical arguments.那是一场引发强烈的伦理道德争论的辩论。

177 ethics   

n.伦理学；伦理观，道德标准

参考例句：

• The ethics of his profession don't permit him to do that.他的职业道德不允许他那样做。
• Personal ethics and professional ethics sometimes conflict.个人道德和职业道德有时会相互抵触。

178 invincibly   

adv.难战胜地，无敌地

参考例句：

• Invincibly, the troops moved forward. 这支军队一路前进，所向披靡。 来自互联网

179 crave   

vt.渴望得到，迫切需要，恳求，请求

参考例句：

• Many young children crave attention.许多小孩子渴望得到关心。
• You may be craving for some fresh air.你可能很想呼吸呼吸新鲜空气。

180 counterfeit   

vt.伪造，仿造；adj.伪造的，假冒的

参考例句：

• It is a crime to counterfeit money.伪造货币是犯罪行为。
• The painting looked old but was a recent counterfeit.这幅画看上去年代久远，实际是最近的一幅赝品。

181 Christian   

adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒

参考例句：

• They always addressed each other by their Christian name.他们总是以教名互相称呼。
• His mother is a sincere Christian.他母亲是个虔诚的基督教徒。

182 anarchist   

n.无政府主义者

参考例句：

• You must be an anarchist at heart.你在心底肯定是个无政府主义者。
• I did my best to comfort them and assure them I was not an anarchist.我尽量安抚他们并让它们明白我并不是一个无政府主义者。

183 dubbed   

v.给…起绰号( dub的过去式和过去分词 )；把…称为；配音；复制

参考例句：

• Mathematics was once dubbed the handmaiden of the sciences. 数学曾一度被视为各门科学的基础。
• Is the movie dubbed or does it have subtitles? 这部电影是配音的还是打字幕的？ 来自《简明英汉词典》

184 perceptive   

adj.知觉的，有洞察力的，感知的

参考例句：

• This is a very perceptive assessment of the situation.这是一个对该情况的极富洞察力的评价。
• He is very perceptive and nothing can be hidden from him.他耳聪目明，什么事都很难瞒住他。

185 doom   

n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定

参考例句：

• The report on our economic situation is full of doom and gloom.这份关于我们经济状况的报告充满了令人绝望和沮丧的调子。
• The dictator met his doom after ten years of rule.独裁者统治了十年终于完蛋了。

186 revert   

v.恢复，复归，回到

参考例句：

• Let us revert to the earlier part of the chapter.让我们回到本章的前面部分。
• Shall we revert to the matter we talked about yesterday?我们接着昨天谈过的问题谈，好吗？

187 reverting   

恢复( revert的现在分词 )； 重提； 回到…上； 归还

参考例句：

• The boss came back from holiday all relaxed and smiling, but now he's reverting to type. 老板刚度假回来时十分随和，满面笑容，现在又恢复原样了。
• The conversation kept reverting to the subject of money. 谈话的内容总是离不开钱的事。

188 muse   

n.缪斯（希腊神话中的女神），创作灵感

参考例句：

• His muse had deserted him,and he could no longer write.他已无灵感，不能再写作了。
• Many of the papers muse on the fate of the President.很多报纸都在揣测总统的命运。

189 divers   

adj.不同的；种种的

参考例句：

• He chose divers of them,who were asked to accompany him.他选择他们当中的几个人，要他们和他作伴。
• Two divers work together while a standby diver remains on the surface.两名潜水员协同工作，同时有一名候补潜水员留在水面上。

190 irrelevant   

adj.不恰当的，无关系的，不相干的

参考例句：

• That is completely irrelevant to the subject under discussion.这跟讨论的主题完全不相关。
• A question about arithmetic is irrelevant in a music lesson.在音乐课上，一个数学的问题是风马牛不相及的。

191 fabulous   

adj.极好的；极为巨大的；寓言中的，传说中的

参考例句：

• We had a fabulous time at the party.我们在晚会上玩得很痛快。
• This is a fabulous sum of money.这是一笔巨款。

192 subscribe   

vi.(to)订阅，订购；同意；vt.捐助，赞助

参考例句：

• I heartily subscribe to that sentiment.我十分赞同那个观点。
• The magazine is trying to get more readers to subscribe.该杂志正大力发展新订户。

193 unintelligible   

adj.无法了解的，难解的，莫明其妙的

参考例句：

• If a computer is given unintelligible data, it returns unintelligible results.如果计算机得到的是难以理解的数据，它给出的也将是难以理解的结果。
• The terms were unintelligible to ordinary folk.这些术语一般人是不懂的。

194 sham   

n./adj.假冒(的)，虚伪(的)

参考例句：

• They cunningly played the game of sham peace.他们狡滑地玩弄假和平的把戏。
• His love was a mere sham.他的爱情是虚假的。

195 denomination   

n.命名，取名，(度量衡、货币等的)单位

参考例句：

• The firm is still operating under another denomination.这家公司改用了名称仍在继续营业。
• Litre is a metric denomination.升是公制单位。

196 immutable   

adj.不可改变的，永恒的

参考例句：

• Nothing in the world is immutable.世界没有一成不变的东西。
• They free our minds from considering our world as fixed and immutable.它们改变着人们将世界看作是永恒不变的观点。

197 serial   

n.连本影片，连本电视节目；adj.连续的

参考例句：

• A new serial is starting on television tonight.今晚电视开播一部新的电视连续剧。
• Can you account for the serial failures in our experiment?你能解释我们实验屡屡失败的原因吗？

198 cardinal   

n.(天主教的)红衣主教；adj.首要的，基本的

参考例句：

• This is a matter of cardinal significance.这是非常重要的事。
• The Cardinal coloured with vexation. 红衣主教感到恼火，脸涨得通红。

199 predecessors   

n.前任( predecessor的名词复数 )；前辈；（被取代的）原有事物；前身

参考例句：

• The new government set about dismantling their predecessors' legislation. 新政府正着手废除其前任所制定的法律。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Will new plan be any more acceptable than its predecessors? 新计划比原先的计划更能令人满意吗？ 来自《简明英汉词典》

200 chromatic   

adj.色彩的，颜色的

参考例句：

• The removal of the chromatic aberration is then of primary importance.这时消除色差具有头等重要性。
• In lampblack many kitchens easy to present the chromatic aberration.油烟较多的厨房中易出现色差。

201 briefly   

adv.简单地，简短地

参考例句：

• I want to touch briefly on another aspect of the problem.我想简单地谈一下这个问题的另一方面。
• He was kidnapped and briefly detained by a terrorist group.他被一个恐怖组织绑架并短暂拘禁。

202 symbolically   

ad.象征地，象征性地

参考例句：

• By wearing the ring on the third finger of the left hand, a married couple symbolically declares their eternal love for each other. 将婚戒戴在左手的第三只手指上，意味着夫妻双方象征性地宣告他们的爱情天长地久，他们定能白头偕老。
• Symbolically, he coughed to clear his throat. 周经理象征地咳一声无谓的嗽，清清嗓子。

203 symbolic   

adj.象征性的，符号的，象征主义的

参考例句：

• It is symbolic of the fighting spirit of modern womanhood.它象征着现代妇女的战斗精神。
• The Christian ceremony of baptism is a symbolic act.基督教的洗礼仪式是一种象征性的做法。

204 expunged   

v.擦掉( expunge的过去式和过去分词 )；除去；删去；消除

参考例句：

• Details of his criminal activities were expunged from the file. 他犯罪活动的详细情况已从档案中删去。
• His name is expunged from the list. 他的名字从名单中被除掉了。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

205 remains   

n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹

参考例句：

• He ate the remains of food hungrily.他狼吞虎咽地吃剩余的食物。
• The remains of the meal were fed to the dog.残羹剩饭喂狗了。

206 expunging   

v.擦掉( expunge的现在分词 )；除去；删去；消除

参考例句：

207 contemplate   

vt.盘算，计议；周密考虑；注视，凝视

参考例句：

• The possibility of war is too horrifying to contemplate.战争的可能性太可怕了，真不堪细想。
• The consequences would be too ghastly to contemplate.后果不堪设想。

208 naturalists   

n.博物学家( naturalist的名词复数 )；（文学艺术的）自然主义者

参考例句：

• Naturalists differ much in determining what characters are of generic value. 自然学者对于不同性状决定生物的属的含义上，各有各的见解。 来自辞典例句
• This fact has led naturalists to believe that the Isthmus was formerly open. 使许多自然学者相信这个地蛱在以前原是开通的。 来自辞典例句

209 adoration   

n.爱慕，崇拜

参考例句：

• He gazed at her with pure adoration.他一往情深地注视着她。
• The old lady fell down in adoration before Buddhist images.那老太太在佛像面前顶礼膜拜。

210 bosom   

n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的

参考例句：

• She drew a little book from her bosom.她从怀里取出一本小册子。
• A dark jealousy stirred in his bosom.他内心生出一阵恶毒的嫉妒。

211 serially   

adv.连续地，连续刊载地

参考例句：

• A method of device interconnection for determining interruptpriority by connecting the interrupt sources serially. 设备互连的一种方式，通过与中断源串连的顺序确定设备的中断优先级。 来自辞典例句
• BATCH PROCESSING:Execution of programs serially with no interactive processing. 批处理：程序执行是连续的，无交互式处理。 来自互联网

212 likeness   

n.相像，相似（之处）

参考例句：

• I think the painter has produced a very true likeness.我认为这位画家画得非常逼真。
• She treasured the painted likeness of her son.她珍藏她儿子的画像。

213 apprehending   

逮捕，拘押( apprehend的现在分词 )； 理解

参考例句：

• China has not been totally unsuccessful apprehending corruption suspects. 在逮捕腐化分子方面，中国并非毫无进展。
• Apprehending violence is not an easy task. 惧怕暴力不是一件容易的事。

214 apprehend   

vt.理解，领悟，逮捕，拘捕，忧虑

参考例句：

• I apprehend no worsening of the situation.我不担心局势会恶化。
• Police have not apprehended her killer.警察还未抓获谋杀她的凶手。

215 applied   

adj.应用的；v.应用，适用

参考例句：

• She plans to take a course in applied linguistics.她打算学习应用语言学课程。
• This cream is best applied to the face at night.这种乳霜最好晚上擦脸用。

216 motive   

n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的

参考例句：

• The police could not find a motive for the murder.警察不能找到谋杀的动机。
• He had some motive in telling this fable.他讲这寓言故事是有用意的。

217 spectrum   

n.谱，光谱，频谱；范围，幅度，系列

参考例句：

• This is a kind of atomic spectrum.这是一种原子光谱。
• We have known much of the constitution of the solar spectrum.关于太阳光谱的构成，我们已了解不少。

218 supersede   

v.替代；充任

参考例句：

• We must supersede old machines by new ones.我们必须以新机器取代旧机器。
• The use of robots will someday supersede manual labor.机器人的使用有一天会取代人力。

219 mutual   

adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的

参考例句：

• We must pull together for mutual interest.我们必须为相互的利益而通力合作。
• Mutual interests tied us together.相互的利害关系把我们联系在一起。

220 emanates   

v.从…处传出，传出( emanate的第三人称单数 )；产生，表现，显示

参考例句：

• He emanates power and confidence. 他表现出力量和信心。
• He emanates sympathy. 他流露出同情。 来自辞典例句

221 ascertained   

v.弄清，确定，查明( ascertain的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The previously unidentified objects have now been definitely ascertained as being satellites. 原来所说的不明飞行物现在已证实是卫星。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• I ascertained that she was dead. 我断定她已经死了。 来自《简明英汉词典》

222 enumerates   

v.列举，枚举，数( enumerate的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• Enumerates the transaction options when sending or receiving a message. 发送或接收消息时，枚举事务处理选项。 来自互联网
• Ming as Researcher enumerates research projects conducted and those in progress. [潘氏研究]举曾经进行﹐及现在进行的研究计划。 来自互联网

223 synthetic   

adj.合成的，人工的；综合的；n.人工制品

参考例句：

• We felt the salesman's synthetic friendliness.我们感觉到那位销售员的虚情假意。
• It's a synthetic diamond.这是人造钻石。

224 apparently   

adv.显然地；表面上，似乎

参考例句：

• An apparently blind alley leads suddenly into an open space.山穷水尽，豁然开朗。
• He was apparently much surprised at the news.他对那个消息显然感到十分惊异。

225 systematic   

adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的

参考例句：

• The way he works isn't very systematic.他的工作不是很有条理。
• The teacher made a systematic work of teaching.这个教师进行系统的教学工作。

226 mighty   

adj.强有力的；巨大的

参考例句：

• A mighty force was about to break loose.一股巨大的力量即将迸发而出。
• The mighty iceberg came into view.巨大的冰山出现在眼前。

227 flux   

n.流动；不断的改变

参考例句：

• The market is in a constant state of flux.市场行情在不断变化。
• In most reactors,there is a significant flux of fast neutrons.在大部分反应堆中都有一定强度的快中子流。

228 embodied   

v.表现( embody的过去式和过去分词 )；象征；包括；包含

参考例句：

• a politician who embodied the hopes of black youth 代表黑人青年希望的政治家
• The heroic deeds of him embodied the glorious tradition of the troops. 他的英雄事迹体现了军队的光荣传统。 来自《简明英汉词典》

229 discriminating   

a.有辨别能力的

参考例句：

• Due caution should be exercised in discriminating between the two. 在区别这两者时应该相当谨慎。
• Many businesses are accused of discriminating against women. 许多企业被控有歧视妇女的做法。

230 mobility   

n.可动性，变动性，情感不定

参考例句：

• The difference in regional house prices acts as an obstacle to mobility of labour.不同地区房价的差异阻碍了劳动力的流动。
• Mobility is very important in guerrilla warfare.机动性在游击战中至关重要。

231 discriminate   

v.区别，辨别，区分；有区别地对待

参考例句：

• You must learn to discriminate between facts and opinions.你必须学会把事实和看法区分出来。
• They can discriminate hundreds of colours.他们能分辨上百种颜色。

232 solely   

adv.仅仅，唯一地

参考例句：

• Success should not be measured solely by educational achievement.成功与否不应只用学业成绩来衡量。
• The town depends almost solely on the tourist trade.这座城市几乎完全靠旅游业维持。

233 woe   

n.悲哀，苦痛，不幸，困难；int.用来表达悲伤或惊慌

参考例句：

• Our two peoples are brothers sharing weal and woe.我们两国人民是患难与共的兄弟。
• A man is well or woe as he thinks himself so.自认祸是祸，自认福是福。

234 crumb   

n.饼屑，面包屑，小量

参考例句：

• It was the only crumb of comfort he could salvage from the ordeal.这是他从这场磨难里能找到的唯一的少许安慰。
• Ruth nearly choked on the last crumb of her pastry.鲁斯几乎被糕点的最后一块碎屑所噎住。

235 physically   

adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律

参考例句：

• He was out of sorts physically,as well as disordered mentally.他浑身不舒服，心绪也很乱。
• Every time I think about it I feel physically sick.一想起那件事我就感到极恶心。

236 conceit   

n.自负，自高自大

参考例句：

• As conceit makes one lag behind,so modesty helps one make progress.骄傲使人落后，谦虚使人进步。
• She seems to be eaten up with her own conceit.她仿佛已经被骄傲冲昏了头脑。

237 velocities   

n.速度( velocity的名词复数 )；高速，快速

参考例句：

• In experimenting we find out that sound travels with different velocities through different substances. 在实验中，我们发现声音以不同的速度通过不同的物质而传播。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• A gas in thermal equilibrium has particles of all velocities. 处于热平衡的气体，其粒子有一切速度。 来自辞典例句

238 coerced   

v.迫使做( coerce的过去式和过去分词 )；强迫；（以武力、惩罚、威胁等手段）控制；支配

参考例句：

• They were coerced into negotiating a settlement. 他们被迫通过谈判解决。
• He was coerced into making a confession. 他被迫招供。 来自《简明英汉词典》

239 coalesce   

v.联合，结合，合并

参考例句：

• And these rings of gas would then eventually coalesce and form the planets.这些气体环最后终于凝结形成行星。
• They will probably collide again and again until they coalesce.他们可能会一次又一次地发生碰撞，直到他们合并。

240 subdividing   

再分，细分( subdivide的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• The system is designed to realize the subdividing drive, adjusting and position. 实现细分驱动器、调速控制、定位控制和软硬接口的设计。
• A joint-tracing counting and subdividing method for moiré fringes is presented. 提出一种对非正交莫尔条纹信号进行计数细分的方法。

241 abridged   

削减的，删节的

参考例句：

• The rights of citizens must not be abridged without proper cause. 没有正当理由，不能擅自剥夺公民的权利。
• The play was abridged for TV. 剧本经过节略，以拍摄电视片。

242 warped   

adj.反常的；乖戾的；（变）弯曲的；变形的v.弄弯，变歪( warp的过去式和过去分词 )；使（行为等）不合情理，使乖戾，

参考例句：

• a warped sense of humour 畸形的幽默感
• The board has warped. 木板翘了。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

243 warping   

n.翘面，扭曲，变形v.弄弯，变歪( warp的现在分词 )；使（行为等）不合情理，使乖戾，

参考例句：

• Tilting, warping, and changes in elevation can seriously affect canals and shoreline facilities of various kinks. 倾斜、翘曲和高程变化可以严重地影响水渠和各种岸边设备。 来自辞典例句
• A warping, bending, or cracking, as that by excessive force. 翘曲，弯曲，裂开：翘曲、弯曲或裂开，如过强的外力引起。 来自互联网

244 deformation   

n.形状损坏；变形；畸形

参考例句：

• The deformation frequencies are not sufficiently distinctive.其变形频率不是十分明显的。
• The calculated deformation is almost equal to the real situation by measurement.经检测，计算变形量与实际情况基本一致。

245 subdivide   

vt.细分（细区分，再划分，重分，叠分，分小类）

参考例句：

• You can use sales organizations to subdivide markets into regions.用销售组织将市场细分为区域。
• The verbs were subdivided into transitive and intransitive categories.动词可细分为及物动词和不及物动词。

246 heterogeneous   

adj.庞杂的；异类的

参考例句：

• There is a heterogeneous mass of papers in the teacher's office.老师的办公室里堆满了大批不同的论文。
• America has a very heterogeneous population.美国人口是由不同种族组成的。

247 accounting   

n.会计，会计学，借贷对照表

参考例句：

• A job fell vacant in the accounting department.财会部出现了一个空缺。
• There's an accounting error in this entry.这笔账目里有差错。

248 attained   

（通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况）

参考例句：

• She has attained the degree of Master of Arts. 她已获得文学硕士学位。
• Lu Hsun attained a high position in the republic of letters. 鲁迅在文坛上获得崇高的地位。

249 awareness   

n.意识，觉悟，懂事，明智

参考例句：

• There is a general awareness that smoking is harmful.人们普遍认识到吸烟有害健康。
• Environmental awareness has increased over the years.这些年来人们的环境意识增强了。

250 recurring   

adj.往复的，再次发生的

参考例句：

• This kind of problem is recurring often. 这类问题经常发生。
• For our own country, it has been a time for recurring trial. 就我们国家而言，它经过了一个反复考验的时期。

251 negation   

n.否定；否认

参考例句：

• No reasonable negation can be offered.没有合理的反对意见可以提出。
• The author boxed the compass of negation in his article.该作者在文章中依次探讨了各种反面的意见。

252 slayer   

n. 杀人者，凶手

参考例句：

• The young man was Oedipus, who thus unknowingly became the slayer of his own father. 这位青年就是俄狄浦斯。他在不明真相的情况下杀死了自己的父亲。
• May I depend on you to stand by me and my daughters, then, deer-slayer? 如此说来，我可以指望你照料我和女儿了，杀鹿人？

253 slay   

v.杀死，宰杀，杀戮

参考例句：

• He intended to slay his father's murderer.他意图杀死杀父仇人。
• She has ordered me to slay you.她命令我把你杀了。

254 progenitors   

n.祖先( progenitor的名词复数 )；先驱；前辈；原本

参考例句：

• The researchers also showed that the progenitors mature into neurons in Petri dishes. 研究人员还表示，在佩特里培养皿中的脑细胞前体可以发育成神经元。 来自英汉非文学 - 生命科学 - 大脑与疾病
• Though I am poor and wretched now, my progenitors were famously wealthy. 别看我现在穷困潦倒，我家上世可是有名的富翁。 来自互联网

255 posterity   

n.后裔，子孙，后代

参考例句：

• Few of his works will go down to posterity.他的作品没有几件会流传到后世。
• The names of those who died are recorded for posterity on a tablet at the back of the church.死者姓名都刻在教堂后面的一块石匾上以便后人铭记。

256 frustrates   

v.使不成功( frustrate的第三人称单数 )；挫败；使受挫折；令人沮丧

参考例句：

• What frustrates him is that there's too little money to spend on the project. 使他懊恼的是，可用于这个项目的资金太少。
• His trouble is that he frustrates much easily. 他的毛病是很容易泄气。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

257 frustrate   

v.使失望；使沮丧；使厌烦

参考例句：

• But this didn't frustrate Einstein.He was content to go as far as he could.但这并没有使爱因斯坦灰心，他对能够更深入地研究而感到满意。
• They made their preparations to frustrate the conspiracy.他们作好准备挫败这个阴谋。

258 terminology   

n.术语；专有名词

参考例句：

• He particularly criticized the terminology in the document.他特别批评了文件中使用的术语。
• The article uses rather specialized musical terminology.这篇文章用了相当专业的音乐术语。

259 pigment   

n.天然色素，干粉颜料

参考例句：

• The Romans used natural pigments on their fabrics and walls.古罗马人在织物和墙壁上使用天然颜料。
• Who thought he might know what the skin pigment phenomenon meant.他自认为可能知道皮肤色素出现这种现象到底是怎么回事。

260 subtraction   

n.减法，减去

参考例句：

• We do addition and subtraction in arithmetic.在算术里,我们作加减运算。
• They made a subtraction of 50 dollars from my salary.他们从我的薪水里扣除了五十美元。

261 worthy   

adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的

参考例句：

• I did not esteem him to be worthy of trust.我认为他不值得信赖。
• There occurred nothing that was worthy to be mentioned.没有值得一提的事发生。

262 politic   

adj.有智虑的；精明的；v.从政

参考例句：

• He was too politic to quarrel with so important a personage.他很聪明，不会与这么重要的人争吵。
• The politic man tried not to offend people.那个精明的人尽量不得罪人。

263 alienate   

vt.使疏远，离间；转让(财产等)

参考例句：

• His attempts to alienate the two friends failed because they had complete faith.他离间那两个朋友的企图失败了，因为他们彼此完全信任。
• We'd better not alienate ourselves from the colleagues.我们最好还是不要与同事们疏远。

264 immortal   

adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的

参考例句：

• The wild cocoa tree is effectively immortal.野生可可树实际上是不会死的。
• The heroes of the people are immortal!人民英雄永垂不朽！

265 explicit   

adj.详述的，明确的；坦率的；显然的

参考例句：

• She was quite explicit about why she left.她对自己离去的原因直言不讳。
• He avoids the explicit answer to us.他避免给我们明确的回答。

266 immutability   

n.不变(性)

参考例句：

• Farmers all over the globe knowinging the importance and immutability the seasons. 全全地球的农民们都明白季节的很重要性和永恒性。
• The immutability of God is a strong ground of consolation and encourages hope and confidence. 上帝的不变性乃是我们安慰的坚固根基，鼓励我们充满著盼望，信心。

267 demonstrations   

证明( demonstration的名词复数 )； 表明； 表达； 游行示威

参考例句：

• Lectures will be interspersed with practical demonstrations. 讲课中将不时插入实际示范。
• The new military government has banned strikes and demonstrations. 新的军人政府禁止罢工和示威活动。

268 immutably   

adv.不变地，永恒地

参考例句：

• Only reefs stand alone immutably on the beach after a typhoon. 台风过后，海滩上只有那些礁石岿然独存。 来自互联网

269 verities   

n.真实( verity的名词复数 )；事实；真理；真实的陈述

参考例句：

• the eternal verities of life 生命永恒的真理

270 carving   

n.雕刻品，雕花

参考例句：

• All the furniture in the room had much carving.房间里所有的家具上都有许多雕刻。
• He acquired the craft of wood carving in his native town.他在老家学会了木雕手艺。

271 immortals   

不朽的人物( immortal的名词复数 )； 永生不朽者

参考例句：

• Nobody believes in the myth about human beings becoming immortals. 谁也不相信人能成仙的神话。
• Shakespeare is one of the immortals. 莎士比亚是不朽的人物之一。

272 mathematician   

n.数学家

参考例句：

• The man with his back to the camera is a mathematician.背对着照相机的人是位数学家。
• The mathematician analyzed his figures again.这位数学家再次分析研究了他的这些数字。

273 precisely   

adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地

参考例句：

• It's precisely that sort of slick sales-talk that I mistrust.我不相信的正是那种油腔滑调的推销宣传。
• The man adjusted very precisely.那个人调得很准。

274 corroborate   

v.支持，证实，确定

参考例句：

• He looked at me anxiously,as if he hoped I'd corroborate this.他神色不安地看着我，仿佛他希望我证实地的话。
• It appeared that what he said went to corroborate my account.看来他所说的和我叙述的相符。

275 veracity   

n.诚实

参考例句：

• I can testify to this man's veracity and good character.我可以作证，此人诚实可靠品德良好。
• There is no reason to doubt the veracity of the evidence.没有理由怀疑证据的真实性。

276 deity   

n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物)

参考例句：

• Many animals were seen as the manifestation of a deity.许多动物被看作神的化身。
• The deity was hidden in the deepest recesses of the temple.神藏在庙宇壁龛的最深处。

277 invoked   

v.援引( invoke的过去式和过去分词 )；行使（权利等）；祈求救助；恳求

参考例句：

• It is unlikely that libel laws will be invoked. 不大可能诉诸诽谤法。
• She had invoked the law in her own defence. 她援引法律为自己辩护。 来自《简明英汉词典》

278 vindication   

n.洗冤，证实

参考例句：

• There is much to be said in vindication of his claim.有很多理由可以提出来为他的要求作辩护。
• The result was a vindication of all our efforts.这一结果表明我们的一切努力是必要的。

279 legislating   

v.立法，制定法律( legislate的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? 为什么那些议员们做在那里不立法？ 来自互联网
• From legislating and protecting peasant's interests organizationally. " 从立法和组织上保护农民利益。 来自互联网

280 analytic   

adj.分析的，用分析方法的

参考例句：

• The boy has an analytic mind. 这男孩有分析的头脑。
• Latin is a synthetic language,while English is analytic.拉丁文是一种综合性语言，而英语是一种分析性语言。

281 delusions   

n.欺骗( delusion的名词复数 )；谬见；错觉；妄想

参考例句：

• the delusions of the mentally ill 精神病患者的妄想
• She wants to travel first-class: she must have delusions of grandeur. 她想坐头等舱旅行，她一定自以为很了不起。 来自辞典例句

282 instinctively   

adv.本能地

参考例句：

• As he leaned towards her she instinctively recoiled. 他向她靠近，她本能地往后缩。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• He knew instinctively where he would find her. 他本能地知道在哪儿能找到她。 来自《简明英汉词典》

283 swarming   

密集( swarm的现在分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去

参考例句：

• The sacks of rice were swarming with bugs. 一袋袋的米里长满了虫子。
• The beach is swarming with bathers. 海滩满是海水浴的人。

284 everlasting   

adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的

参考例句：

• These tyres are advertised as being everlasting.广告上说轮胎持久耐用。
• He believes in everlasting life after death.他相信死后有不朽的生命。

285 juxtaposition   

n.毗邻，并置，并列

参考例句：

• The juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling.这两句话连在一起使人听了震惊。
• It is the result of the juxtaposition of contrasting colors.这是并列对比色的结果。

286 juxtapositions   

n.并置，并列( juxtaposition的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Their early films tried to convey revolutionary propaganda through shocking juxtapositions, and circus tricks. 他们早期的电影试图通过令人震惊的对比和马戏技巧来进行革命宣传。 来自辞典例句
• His richly coloured lyrical paintings depict objects and people in unusual juxtapositions, often floating in space. 他的色彩斑斓的抒情油画将人物和事物不同寻常地加以并置，并经常漂浮在空中。 来自互联网

287 teleological   

adj.目的论的

参考例句：

• Teleological method of interpretation is a very important legal science method. 而作为法学方法的目的解释亦是一种十分重要的法学方法。 来自互联网
• Can evolution evolve its own teleological purpose? 进化能进化自己的目的吗？ 来自互联网

288 promising   

adj.有希望的，有前途的

参考例句：

• The results of the experiments are very promising.实验的结果充满了希望。
• We're trying to bring along one or two promising young swimmers.我们正设法培养出一两名有前途的年轻游泳选手。

289 sentimental   

adj.多愁善感的，感伤的

参考例句：

• She's a sentimental woman who believes marriage comes by destiny.她是多愁善感的人，她相信姻缘命中注定。
• We were deeply touched by the sentimental movie.我们深深被那感伤的电影所感动。

290 steadily   

adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地

参考例句：

• The scope of man's use of natural resources will steadily grow.人类利用自然资源的广度将日益扩大。
• Our educational reform was steadily led onto the correct path.我们的教学改革慢慢上轨道了。

291 sentimentally   

adv.富情感地

参考例句：

• I miss the good old days, ' she added sentimentally. ‘我怀念过去那些美好的日子，’她动情地补充道。 来自互联网
• I have an emotional heart, it is sentimentally attached to you unforgettable. 我心中有一份情感，那是对你刻骨铭心的眷恋。 来自互联网

292 sterility   

n.不生育，不结果，贫瘠，消毒，无菌

参考例句：

• A major barrier to interspecific hybridization is sterility in the F1 progeny.种间杂交的主要障碍是F1代的不育性。
• Sterility is some permanent factor preventing procreation.不育是阻碍生殖的一种永久性因素。

293 harmonious   

adj.和睦的，调和的，和谐的，协调的

参考例句：

• Their harmonious relationship resulted in part from their similar goals.他们关系融洽的部分原因是他们有着相似的目标。
• The room was painted in harmonious colors.房间油漆得色彩调和。

294 discordant   

adj.不调和的

参考例句：

• Leonato thought they would make a discordant pair.里奥那托认为他们不适宜作夫妻。
• For when we are deeply mournful discordant above all others is the voice of mirth.因为当我们极度悲伤的时候，欢乐的声音会比其他一切声音都更显得不谐调。

295 unnatural   

adj.不自然的；反常的

参考例句：

• Did her behaviour seem unnatural in any way?她有任何反常表现吗？
• She has an unnatural smile on her face.她脸上挂着做作的微笑。

296 allege   

vt.宣称，申述，主张，断言

参考例句：

• The newspaper reporters allege that the man was murdered but they have given no proof.新闻记者们宣称这个男人是被谋杀的，但他们没提出证据。
• Students occasionally allege illness as the reason for absence.学生时不时会称病缺课。

297 explicitly   

ad.明确地，显然地

参考例句：

• The plan does not explicitly endorse the private ownership of land. 该计划没有明确地支持土地私有制。
• SARA amended section 113 to provide explicitly for a right to contribution. 《最高基金修正与再授权法案》修正了第123条，清楚地规定了分配权。 来自英汉非文学 - 环境法 - 环境法

298 repudiate   

v.拒绝，拒付，拒绝履行

参考例句：

• He will indignantly repudiate the suggestion.他会气愤地拒绝接受这一意见。
• He repudiate all debts incurred by his son.他拒绝偿还他儿子的一切债务。

299 deductions   

扣除( deduction的名词复数 )； 结论； 扣除的量； 推演

参考例句：

• Many of the older officers trusted agents sightings more than cryptanalysts'deductions. 许多年纪比较大的军官往往相信特务的发现，而不怎么相信密码分析员的推断。
• You know how you rush at things,jump to conclusions without proper deductions. 你知道你处理问题是多么仓促，毫无合适的演绎就仓促下结论。

300 kinetic   

adj.运动的；动力学的

参考例句：

• There exist many sources of energy both potential and kinetic.存在着许多势能和动能的能源。
• The kinetic theory of gases is the best known example.气体动力学理论就是最有名的例子。

301 primordial   

adj.原始的；最初的

参考例句：

• It is the primordial force that propels us forward.它是推动我们前进的原始动力。
• The Neanderthal Man is one of our primordial ancestors.的尼安德特人是我们的原始祖先之一.

302 atones   

v.补偿，赎（罪）( atone的第三人称单数 )；补偿，弥补，赎回

参考例句：

• His hard work atones for his lack of skill. 他的艰苦努力弥补了技术的不熟练。 来自互联网
• Not all our geese become swans, but one swan atones for many flocks of geese. 我们周遭的芸芸众生并非个个都会成大器，但这些芸芸众生中只要一个成大器就够了。 来自互联网

303 craving   

n.渴望,热望

参考例句：

• a craving for chocolate 非常想吃巧克力
• She skipped normal meals to satisfy her craving for chocolate and crisps. 她不吃正餐，以便满足自己吃巧克力和炸薯片的渴望。

304 investigator   

n.研究者，调查者，审查者

参考例句：

• He was a special investigator for the FBI.他是联邦调查局的特别调查员。
• The investigator was able to deduce the crime and find the criminal.调查者能够推出犯罪过程并锁定罪犯。

305 elude   

v.躲避，困惑

参考例句：

• If you chase it,it will elude you.如果你追逐着它， 它会躲避你。
• I had dared and baffled his fury.I must elude his sorrow.我曾经面对过他的愤怒，并且把它挫败了；现在我必须躲避他的悲哀。

306 intelligibility   

n.可理解性，可理解的事物

参考例句：

• Further research on the effects of different characteristics on intelligibility is necessary. 不同的特征对字码可懂度的影响力的进一步研究是必要的。 来自互联网
• Demand concisely intelligibility, word number 30 or so thanks! 要求简洁明了，字数30左右谢谢啦！ 来自互联网

307 conformity   

n.一致，遵从，顺从

参考例句：

• Was his action in conformity with the law?他的行动是否合法？
• The plan was made in conformity with his views.计划仍按他的意见制定。

308 spatial   

adj.空间的，占据空间的

参考例句：

• This part of brain judges the spatial relationship between objects.大脑的这部分判断物体间的空间关系。
• They said that time is the feeling of spatial displacement.他们说时间是空间位移的感觉。

309 repulsive   

adj.排斥的，使人反感的

参考例句：

• She found the idea deeply repulsive.她发现这个想法很恶心。
• The repulsive force within the nucleus is enormous.核子内部的斥力是巨大的。

310 intensity   

n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度

参考例句：

• I didn't realize the intensity of people's feelings on this issue.我没有意识到这一问题能引起群情激奋。
• The strike is growing in intensity.罢工日益加剧。

311 candidly   

adv.坦率地，直率而诚恳地

参考例句：

• He has stopped taking heroin now,but admits candidly that he will always be a drug addict.他眼下已经不再吸食海洛因了,不过他坦言自己永远都是个瘾君子。
• Candidly,David,I think you're being unreasonable.大卫，说实话我认为你不讲道理。

312 poetic   

adj.富有诗意的，有诗人气质的，善于抒情的

参考例句：

• His poetic idiom is stamped with expressions describing group feeling and thought.他的诗中的措辞往往带有描写群体感情和思想的印记。
• His poetic novels have gone through three different historical stages.他的诗情小说创作经历了三个不同的历史阶段。

313 justified   

a.正当的，有理的

参考例句：

• She felt fully justified in asking for her money back. 她认为有充分的理由要求退款。
• The prisoner has certainly justified his claims by his actions. 那个囚犯确实已用自己的行动表明他的要求是正当的。

314 sonorous   

adj.响亮的，回响的；adv.圆润低沉地；感人地；n.感人，堂皇

参考例句：

• The sonorous voice of the speaker echoed round the room.那位演讲人洪亮的声音在室内回荡。
• He has a deep sonorous voice.他的声音深沉而洪亮。

315 discrete   

adj.个别的，分离的，不连续的

参考例句：

• The picture consists of a lot of discrete spots of colour.这幅画由许多不相连的色点组成。
• Most staple fibers are discrete,individual entities.大多数短纤维是不联系的单独实体。

316 postulates   

v.假定，假设( postulate的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• They proclaimed to be eternal postulates of reason and justice. 他们宣称这些原则是理性和正义的永恒的要求。 来自辞典例句
• The school building programme postulates an increase in educational investment. 修建校舍的计画是在增加教育经费的前提下拟定的。 来自辞典例句

317 vaguely   

adv.含糊地，暖昧地

参考例句：

• He had talked vaguely of going to work abroad.他含糊其词地说了到国外工作的事。
• He looked vaguely before him with unseeing eyes.他迷迷糊糊的望着前面，对一切都视而不见。

318 postulated   

v.假定，假设( postulate的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• They postulated a 500-year lifespan for a plastic container. 他们假定塑料容器的寿命为500年。
• Freud postulated that we all have a death instinct as well as a life instinct. 弗洛伊德曾假定我们所有人都有生存本能和死亡本能。 来自辞典例句

319 incipient   

adj.起初的，发端的，初期的

参考例句：

• The anxiety has been sharpened by the incipient mining boom.采矿业初期的蓬勃发展加剧了这种担忧。
• What we see then is an incipient global inflation.因此，我们看到的是初期阶段的全球通胀.

320 irrational   

adj.无理性的，失去理性的

参考例句：

• After taking the drug she became completely irrational.她在吸毒后变得完全失去了理性。
• There are also signs of irrational exuberance among some investors.在某些投资者中是存在非理性繁荣的征象的。

321 triumphant   

adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的

参考例句：

• The army made a triumphant entry into the enemy's capital.部队胜利地进入了敌方首都。
• There was a positively triumphant note in her voice.她的声音里带有一种极为得意的语气。

322 justifies   

证明…有理( justify的第三人称单数 )； 为…辩护； 对…作出解释； 为…辩解（或辩护）

参考例句：

• Their frequency of use both justifies and requires the memorization. 频繁的使用需要记忆，也促进了记忆。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
• In my judgement the present end justifies the means. 照我的意见，只要目的正当，手段是可以不计较的。

323 remodelled   

v.改变…的结构[形状]( remodel的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Oh, thanks. We remodelled it last year. 是吗？谢谢。我们去年改建的。 来自口语例句
• Kathy: Oh, thanks. We remodelled it last year. 凯西：是吗？谢谢。我们去年改建的。 来自互联网

324 repel   

v.击退，抵制，拒绝，排斥

参考例句：

• A country must have the will to repel any invader.一个国家得有决心击退任何入侵者。
• Particles with similar electric charges repel each other.电荷同性的分子互相排斥。

325 subjectivity   

n.主观性（主观主义）

参考例句：

• In studying a problem,we must shun subjectivity.研究问题，忌带主观性。
• 'Cause there's a certain amount of subjectivity involved in recreating a face.因为在重建面部的过程中融入了太多的主观因素？

326 engenders   

v.产生（某形势或状况），造成，引起( engender的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• Sympathy often engenders love. 同情常常产生爱情。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
• Some people believe poverty engenders crime. 有人认为贫困生罪恶。 来自辞典例句

327 unprecedented   

adj.无前例的，新奇的

参考例句：

• The air crash caused an unprecedented number of deaths.这次空难的死亡人数是空前的。
• A flood of this sort is really unprecedented.这样大的洪水真是十年九不遇。

328 maxims   

n.格言，座右铭( maxim的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Courts also draw freely on traditional maxims of construction. 法院也自由吸收传统的解释准则。 来自英汉非文学 - 行政法
• There are variant formulations of some of the maxims. 有些准则有多种表达方式。 来自辞典例句

329 oracle   

n.神谕，神谕处，预言

参考例句：

• In times of difficulty,she pray for an oracle to guide her.在困难的时候，她祈祷神谕来指引她。
• It is a kind of oracle that often foretells things most important.它是一种内生性神谕，常常能预言最重要的事情。

330 approbation   

n.称赞；认可

参考例句：

• He tasted the wine of audience approbation.他尝到了像酒般令人陶醉的听众赞许滋味。
• The result has not met universal approbation.该结果尚未获得普遍认同。

331 conspire   

v.密谋，（事件等）巧合，共同导致

参考例句：

• They'd conspired to overthrow the government.他们曾经密谋推翻政府。
• History and geography have conspired to bring Greece to a moment of decision.历史和地理因素共同将希腊推至作出抉择的紧要关头。

332 discords   

不和（discord的复数形式）

参考例句：

• There are many discords in this family. 在这个家庭里有许多争吵。
• The speaker's opinion discords with the principles of this society. 演讲者的意见与本会的原则不符。

333 excellence   

n.优秀，杰出，(pl.)优点，美德

参考例句：

• His art has reached a high degree of excellence.他的艺术已达到炉火纯青的地步。
• My performance is far below excellence.我的表演离优秀还差得远呢。

334 cohered   

v.黏合( cohere的过去式和过去分词 )；联合；结合；（指看法、推理等）前后一致

参考例句：

• Friendship, to be cohered due to my pursuits and effort. 友谊，因我的追求与努力而凝聚。 来自互联网
• Powerful human resources flow flowcapital flow and trade flow have integrated and cohered all around. 强大的人才流、信息流、资金流、贸易流全方位交汇贯通。 来自互联网

335 equity   

n.公正，公平，（无固定利息的）股票

参考例句：

• They shared the work of the house with equity.他们公平地分担家务。
• To capture his equity,Murphy must either sell or refinance.要获得资产净值，墨菲必须出售或者重新融资。

336 pertains   

关于( pertain的第三人称单数 )； 有关； 存在； 适用

参考例句：

• When one manages upward, none of these clear and unambiguous symbols pertains. 当一个人由下而上地管理时，这些明确无误的信号就全都不复存在了。
• Her conduct hardly pertains to a lady. 她的行为与女士身份不太相符。

337 imperative   

n.命令，需要；规则；祈使语气；adj.强制的；紧急的

参考例句：

• He always speaks in an imperative tone of voice.他老是用命令的口吻讲话。
• The events of the past few days make it imperative for her to act.过去这几天发生的事迫使她不得不立即行动。

338 consistency   

n.一贯性，前后一致，稳定性；(液体的)浓度

参考例句：

• Your behaviour lacks consistency.你的行为缺乏一贯性。
• We appreciate the consistency and stability in China and in Chinese politics.我们赞赏中国及其政策的连续性和稳定性。

339 radical   

n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的

参考例句：

• The patient got a radical cure in the hospital.病人在医院得到了根治。
• She is radical in her demands.她的要求十分偏激。

340 unconditional   

adj.无条件的，无限制的，绝对的

参考例句：

• The victorious army demanded unconditional surrender.胜方要求敌人无条件投降。
• My love for all my children is unconditional.我对自己所有孩子的爱都是无条件的。

341 aspired   

v.渴望，追求( aspire的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• She aspired to a scientific career. 她有志于科学事业。
• Britain,France,the United States and Japan all aspired to hegemony after the end of World War I. 第一次世界大战后，英、法、美、日都想争夺霸权。 来自《简明英汉词典》

342 stickler   

n.坚持细节之人

参考例句：

• She's a real stickler for etiquette,so you'd better ask her advice.她非常讲求礼节，所以你最好问她的意见。
• You will find Mrs. Carboy a stickler about trifles.您会发现卡博太太是个拘泥小节的人。

343 pedantic   

adj.卖弄学问的；迂腐的

参考例句：

• He is learned,but neither stuffy nor pedantic.他很博学，但既不妄自尊大也不卖弄学问。
• Reading in a pedantic way may turn you into a bookworm or a bookcase,and has long been opposed.读死书会变成书呆子，甚至于成为书橱，早有人反对过了。

344 tact   

n.机敏，圆滑，得体

参考例句：

• She showed great tact in dealing with a tricky situation.她处理棘手的局面表现得十分老练。
• Tact is a valuable commodity.圆滑老练是很有用处的。

345 specially   

adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地

参考例句：

• They are specially packaged so that they stack easily.它们经过特别包装以便于堆放。
• The machine was designed specially for demolishing old buildings.这种机器是专为拆毁旧楼房而设计的。

346 nonentity   

n.无足轻重的人

参考例句：

• She was written off then as a political nonentity.她当时被认定是成不了气候的政坛小人物。
• How could such a nonentity become chairman of the company? 这样的庸才怎么能当公司的董事长？

347 plunge   

v.跳入，(使)投入，(使)陷入；猛冲

参考例句：

• Test pool's water temperature before you plunge in.在你跳入之前你应该测试水温。
• That would plunge them in the broil of the two countries.那将会使他们陷入这两国的争斗之中。

348 obsolete   

adj.已废弃的，过时的

参考例句：

• These goods are obsolete and will not fetch much on the market.这些货品过时了，在市场上卖不了高价。
• They tried to hammer obsolete ideas into the young people's heads.他们竭力把陈旧思想灌输给青年。

349 propensities   

n.倾向，习性( propensity的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• This paper regarded AFT as a criterion to estimate slagging propensities. 文中以灰熔点作为判断煤灰结渣倾向的标准。 来自互联网
• Our results demonstrate that different types of authoritarian regime face different propensities to develop toward democracy. 本文研究结果显示，不同的威权主义政体所面对的民主发展倾向是不同的。 来自互联网

350 anteriorly   

adv.先前地，居先地

参考例句：

• Thus, the lower lobe predominates posteriorly and the upper lobe predominates anteriorly. 然后，更低的（下部的）耳垂（耳朵）其次占优势，并且上部耳垂（耳朵）先前占优势。 来自互联网
• The plumbline from C7 shifted anteriorly with age. 从C7起，重力线开始随着年龄向前移动。 来自互联网

351 perpetuated   

vt.使永存（perpetuate的过去式与过去分词形式）

参考例句：

• This system perpetuated itself for several centuries. 这一制度维持了几个世纪。
• I never before saw smile caught like that, and perpetuated. 我从来没有看见过谁的笑容陷入这样的窘况，而且持续不变。 来自辞典例句

352 lapsed   

adj.流失的，堕落的v.退步( lapse的过去式和过去分词 )；陷入；倒退；丧失

参考例句：

• He had lapsed into unconsciousness. 他陷入了昏迷状态。
• He soon lapsed into his previous bad habits. 他很快陷入以前的恶习中去。 来自《简明英汉词典》

353 infancy   

n.婴儿期；幼年期；初期

参考例句：

• He came to England in his infancy.他幼年时期来到英国。
• Their research is only in its infancy.他们的研究处于初级阶段。

354 attachment   

n.附属物，附件；依恋；依附

参考例句：

• She has a great attachment to her sister.她十分依恋她的姐姐。
• She's on attachment to the Ministry of Defense.她现在隶属于国防部。

355 jealousy   

n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌

参考例句：

• Some women have a disposition to jealousy.有些女人生性爱妒忌。
• I can't support your jealousy any longer.我再也无法忍受你的嫉妒了。

356 prospective   

adj.预期的，未来的，前瞻性的

参考例句：

• The story should act as a warning to other prospective buyers.这篇报道应该对其他潜在的购买者起到警示作用。
• They have all these great activities for prospective freshmen.这会举办各种各样的活动来招待未来的新人。

357 utilized   

v.利用，使用( utilize的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• In the19th century waterpower was widely utilized to generate electricity. 在19世纪人们大规模使用水力来发电。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The empty building can be utilized for city storage. 可以利用那栋空建筑物作城市的仓库。 来自《简明英汉词典》

358 ornament   

v.装饰，美化；n.装饰，装饰物

参考例句：

• The flowers were put on the table for ornament.花放在桌子上做装饰用。
• She wears a crystal ornament on her chest.她的前胸戴了一个水晶饰品。

359 civilized   

a.有教养的，文雅的

参考例句：

• Racism is abhorrent to a civilized society. 文明社会憎恶种族主义。
• rising crime in our so-called civilized societies 在我们所谓文明社会中日益增多的犯罪行为

360 differentiated   

区分，区别，辨别( differentiate的过去式和过去分词 )； 区别对待； 表明…间的差别，构成…间差别的特征

参考例句：

• The development of mouse kidney tubules requires two kinds of differentiated cells. 小鼠肾小管的发育需要有两种分化的细胞。
• In this enlargement, barley, alfalfa, and sugar beets can be differentiated. 在这张放大的照片上，大麦，苜蓿和甜菜都能被区分开。

361 devoid   

adj.全无的，缺乏的

参考例句：

• He is completely devoid of humour.他十分缺乏幽默。
• The house is totally devoid of furniture.这所房子里什么家具都没有。

362 killing   

n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财

参考例句：

• Investors are set to make a killing from the sell-off.投资者准备清仓以便大赚一笔。
• Last week my brother made a killing on Wall Street.上个周我兄弟在华尔街赚了一大笔。

363 inadequate   

adj.(for,to)不充足的，不适当的

参考例句：

• The supply is inadequate to meet the demand.供不应求。
• She was inadequate to the demands that were made on her.她还无力满足对她提出的各项要求。

364 inflicted   

把…强加给，使承受，遭受( inflict的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• They inflicted a humiliating defeat on the home team. 他们使主队吃了一场很没面子的败仗。
• Zoya heroically bore the torture that the Fascists inflicted upon her. 卓娅英勇地承受法西斯匪徒加在她身上的酷刑。

365 impels   

v.推动、推进或敦促某人做某事( impel的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• The development of production impels us continuously to study technique. 生产的发展促使我们不断地钻研技术。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• Instinct impels the cuckoo to migrate. 本能促使杜鹃迁徒。 来自辞典例句

366 aggregation   

n.聚合，组合；凝聚

参考例句：

• A high polymer is a very large aggregation of units.一个高聚物是许多单元的非常大的组合。
• Moreover,aggregation influences the outcome of chemical disinfection of viruses.此外，聚集作用还会影响化学消毒的效果。

367 entails   

使…成为必要( entail的第三人称单数 )； 需要； 限定继承； 使必需

参考例句：

• The job entails a lot of hard work. 这工作需要十分艰苦的努力。
• This job entails a lot of hard work. 这项工作需要十分努力。

368 incipiently   

adv.起初地，早期地

参考例句：

369 modifications   

n.缓和( modification的名词复数 )；限制；更改；改变

参考例句：

• The engine was pulled apart for modifications and then reassembled. 发动机被拆开改型，然后再组装起来。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The original plan had undergone fairly extensive modifications. 原计划已经作了相当大的修改。 来自《简明英汉词典》

370 distinguished   

adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的

参考例句：

• Elephants are distinguished from other animals by their long noses.大象以其长长的鼻子显示出与其他动物的不同。
• A banquet was given in honor of the distinguished guests.宴会是为了向贵宾们致敬而举行的。

371 manifestations   

n.表示，显示（manifestation的复数形式）

参考例句：

• These were manifestations of the darker side of his character. 这些是他性格阴暗面的表现。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• To be wordly-wise and play safe is one of the manifestations of liberalism. 明哲保身是自由主义的表现之一。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

372 overestimate   

v.估计过高，过高评价

参考例句：

• Don't overestimate seriousness of the problem.别把问题看重了。
• We overestimate our influence and our nuisance value.我们过高地估计了自己的影响力和破坏作用。

373 knight   

n.骑士，武士；爵士

参考例句：

• He was made an honourary knight.他被授予荣誉爵士称号。
• A knight rode on his richly caparisoned steed.一个骑士骑在装饰华丽的马上。

374 docility   

n.容易教，易驾驶，驯服

参考例句：

• He was trying to plant the seed of revolt, arouse that placid peasant docility. 他想撒下反叛的种子，唤醒这个安分驯良的农民的觉悟。 来自辞典例句
• With unusual docility, Nancy stood up and followed him as he left the newsroom. 南希以难得的顺从站起身来，尾随着他离开了新闻编辑室。 来自辞典例句

375 wary   

adj.谨慎的，机警的，小心的

参考例句：

• He is wary of telling secrets to others.他谨防向他人泄露秘密。
• Paula frowned,suddenly wary.宝拉皱了皱眉头，突然警惕起来。

376 severely   

adv.严格地；严厉地；非常恶劣地

参考例句：

• He was severely criticized and removed from his post.他受到了严厉的批评并且被撤了职。
• He is severely put down for his careless work.他因工作上的粗心大意而受到了严厉的批评。

377 hereditarily   

世袭地，遗传地

参考例句：

• The De Courcy's were hereditarily shortsighted. 德库西家的人祖传下来全是近视眼。
• Moreover an analogous result of hereditarily normal weakly submetacompact is obtained. 进一步还得到了遗传正规的遗传弱次亚紧性的类似结果。

378 surgical   

adj.外科的，外科医生的，手术上的

参考例句：

• He performs the surgical operations at the Red Cross Hospital.他在红十字会医院做外科手术。
• All surgical instruments must be sterilised before use.所有的外科手术器械在使用之前，必须消毒。

379 spinal   

adj.针的，尖刺的，尖刺状突起的；adj.脊骨的，脊髓的

参考例句：

• After three days in Japan,the spinal column becomes extraordinarily flexible.在日本三天，就已经使脊椎骨变得富有弹性了。
• Your spinal column is made up of 24 movable vertebrae.你的脊柱由24个活动的脊椎骨构成。

380 hind   

adj.后面的，后部的

参考例句：

• The animal is able to stand up on its hind limbs.这种动物能够用后肢站立。
• Don't hind her in her studies.不要在学业上扯她后腿。

381 puncture   

n.刺孔，穿孔；v.刺穿，刺破

参考例句：

• Failure did not puncture my confidence.失败并没有挫伤我的信心。
• My bicycle had a puncture and needed patching up.我的自行车胎扎了个洞，需要修补。

382 refinement   

n.文雅；高尚；精美；精制；精炼

参考例句：

• Sally is a woman of great refinement and beauty. 莎莉是个温文尔雅又很漂亮的女士。
• Good manners and correct speech are marks of refinement.彬彬有礼和谈吐得体是文雅的标志。

383 temperament   

n.气质，性格，性情

参考例句：

• The analysis of what kind of temperament you possess is vital.分析一下你有什么样的气质是十分重要的。
• Success often depends on temperament.成功常常取决于一个人的性格。

384 inebriates   

vt.使酒醉，灌醉（inebriate的第三人称单数形式）

参考例句：

• Come and have a cup that cheers but not inebriates tomorrow, will you? 朋友来喝茶，好吗？ 来自互联网

385 degenerate   

v.退步，堕落；adj.退步的，堕落的；n.堕落者

参考例句：

• He didn't let riches and luxury make him degenerate.他不因财富和奢华而自甘堕落。
• Will too much freedom make them degenerate?太多的自由会令他们堕落吗？

386 structural   

adj.构造的，组织的，建筑（用）的

参考例句：

• The storm caused no structural damage.风暴没有造成建筑结构方面的破坏。
• The North American continent is made up of three great structural entities.北美大陆是由三个构造单元组成的。

387 functional   

adj.为实用而设计的，具备功能的，起作用的

参考例句：

• The telephone was out of order,but is functional now.电话刚才坏了，但现在可以用了。
• The furniture is not fancy,just functional.这些家具不是摆着好看的，只是为了实用。

388 rickets   

n.软骨病，佝偻病，驼背

参考例句：

• A diet deficient in vitamin D may cause the disease rickets.缺少维生素D的饮食可能导致软骨病。
• It also appears to do more than just protect against rickets.除了防止软骨病，它还有更多的功能。

389 drooping   

adj. 下垂的，无力的 动词droop的现在分词

参考例句：

• The drooping willows are waving gently in the morning breeze. 晨风中垂柳袅袅。
• The branches of the drooping willows were swaying lightly. 垂柳轻飘飘地摆动。

390 erect   

n./v.树立，建立，使竖立；adj.直立的，垂直的

参考例句：

• She held her head erect and her back straight.她昂着头，把背挺得笔直。
• Soldiers are trained to stand erect.士兵们训练站得笔直。

391 domesticated   

adj.喜欢家庭生活的；（指动物）被驯养了的v.驯化( domesticate的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• He is thoroughly domesticated and cooks a delicious chicken casserole. 他精于家务，烹制的砂锅炖小鸡非常可口。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The donkey is a domesticated form of the African wild ass. 驴是非洲野驴的一种已驯化的品种。 来自《简明英汉词典》

392 corporeal   

adj.肉体的，身体的；物质的

参考例句：

• The body is the corporeal habitation of the soul.身体为灵魂之有形寓所。
• He is very religious;corporeal world has little interest for him.他虔信宗教，对物质上的享受不感兴趣。

393 deviations   

背离，偏离( deviation的名词复数 )； 离经叛道的行为

参考例句：

• Local deviations depend strongly on the local geometry of the solid matrix. 局部偏离严格地依赖于固体矩阵的局部几何形状。
• They were a series of tactical day-to-day deviations from White House policy. 它们是一系列策略上一天天摆脱白宫政策的偏向。

394 corroboration   

n.进一步的证实，进一步的证据

参考例句：

• Without corroboration from forensic tests,it will be difficult to prove that the suspect is guilty. 没有法医化验的确证就很难证明嫌疑犯有罪。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Definitely more independent corroboration is necessary. 有必要更明确地进一步证实。 来自辞典例句

395 captivity   

n.囚禁；被俘；束缚

参考例句：

• A zoo is a place where live animals are kept in captivity for the public to see.动物园是圈养动物以供公众观看的场所。
• He was held in captivity for three years.他被囚禁叁年。

396 wariness   

n. 注意,小心

参考例句：

• The British public's wariness of opera is an anomaly in Europe. 英国公众对歌剧不大轻易接受的态度在欧洲来说很反常。
• There certainly is a history of wariness about using the R-word. 历史表明绝对应当谨慎使用“衰退”一词。

397 neurotic   

adj.神经病的，神经过敏的；n.神经过敏者，神经病患者

参考例句：

• Nothing is more distracting than a neurotic boss. 没有什么比神经过敏的老板更恼人的了。
• There are also unpleasant brain effects such as anxiety and neurotic behaviour.也会对大脑产生不良影响，如焦虑和神经质的行为。

398 undoubtedly   

adv.确实地，无疑地

参考例句：

• It is undoubtedly she who has said that.这话明明是她说的。
• He is undoubtedly the pride of China.毫无疑问他是中国的骄傲。

399 deterioration   

n.退化；恶化；变坏

参考例句：

• Mental and physical deterioration both occur naturally with age. 随着年龄的增长，心智和体力自然衰退。
• The car's bodywork was already showing signs of deterioration. 这辆车的车身已经显示出了劣化迹象。

400 Alcoholics   

n.嗜酒者，酒鬼( alcoholic的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Many alcoholics go on drinking sprees that continue for days at a time. 许多酒鬼一次要狂饮好几天。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• Do you have a copy of the Alcoholics Anonymous book? 你手上有戒酒匿名会的书吗？ 来自互联网

401 parental   

adj.父母的；父的；母的

参考例句：

• He encourages parental involvement in the running of school.他鼓励学生家长参与学校的管理。
• Children always revolt against parental disciplines.孩子们总是反抗父母的管束。

402 degenerates   

衰退，堕落，退化( degenerate的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• Liberty often degenerates into lawlessness. 自由常常变质为无法无天。
• Her health degenerates rapidly. 她的健康状况迅速恶化。

403 neurotically   

参考例句：

• They are finely, not to say nEurotically adjusted. 虽然不能说心理上已经调整好了，但他们的确已经很好了。 来自互联网

404 disperse   

vi.使分散；使消失；vt.分散；驱散

参考例句：

• The cattle were swinging their tails to disperse the flies.那些牛甩动着尾巴驱赶苍蝇。
• The children disperse for the holidays.孩子们放假了。

405 initiate   

vt.开始，创始，发动；启蒙，使入门；引入

参考例句：

• A language teacher should initiate pupils into the elements of grammar.语言老师应该把基本语法教给学生。
• They wanted to initiate a discussion on economics.他们想启动一次经济学讨论。

406 conspicuous   

adj.明眼的，惹人注目的；炫耀的，摆阔气的

参考例句：

• It is conspicuous that smoking is harmful to health.很明显，抽烟对健康有害。
• Its colouring makes it highly conspicuous.它的色彩使它非常惹人注目。

407 trifling   

adj.微不足道的；没什么价值的

参考例句：

• They quarreled over a trifling matter.他们为这种微不足道的事情争吵。
• So far Europe has no doubt, gained a real conveniency,though surely a very trifling one.直到现在为止,欧洲无疑地已经获得了实在的便利，不过那确是一种微不足道的便利。

408 counteract   

vt.对…起反作用，对抗，抵消

参考例句：

• The doctor gave him some medicine to counteract the effect of the poison.医生给他些药解毒。
• Our work calls for mutual support.We shouldn't counteract each other's efforts.工作要互相支持，不要互相拆台。

409 polemic   

n.争论，论战

参考例句：

• He launched into a fierce polemic against the government's policies.他猛烈地抨击政府的政策。
• He wrote a splendid polemic in my favour.他写了一篇出色的文章为我辩护。

410 vitality   

n.活力，生命力，效力

参考例句：

• He came back from his holiday bursting with vitality and good health.他度假归来之后，身强体壮，充满活力。
• He is an ambitious young man full of enthusiasm and vitality.他是个充满热情与活力的有远大抱负的青年。

411 virulent   

adj.有毒的，有恶意的，充满敌意的

参考例句：

• She is very virulent about her former employer.她对她过去的老板恨之入骨。
• I stood up for her despite the virulent criticism.尽管她遭到恶毒的批评，我还是维护她。

412 virtue   

n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力

参考例句：

• He was considered to be a paragon of virtue.他被认为是品德尽善尽美的典范。
• You need to decorate your mind with virtue.你应该用德行美化心灵。

413 obsolescence   

n.过时，陈旧，废弃

参考例句：

• For some small unproductive mills,the reality is not merger but obsolescence and bankruptcy.对一些效率低下的小厂而言，现实不是合并，而是可能被淘汰和破产。
• Finally,the cost approach can provide a basis for allocating penalties,specifically economic obsolescence.最后，成本法可作为一个分配因陈旧特别是因经济

414 invoking   

v.援引( invoke的现在分词 )；行使（权利等）；祈求救助；恳求

参考例句：

• You can customise the behavior of the Asynchronous Server and hence re-brand it by defining your own command set for invoking services. 通过定义自己调用服务的命令集，您可以定制自定义异步服务器的行为，通过为调用服务定义自己的命令集从而对它重新标记。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• You can customize the behavior of the Asynchronous Server and hence re-brand it by defining your own command set for invoking services. 通过定义自己调用服务的命令集，您可以定制自定义异步服务器的行为，通过为调用服务定义自己的命令集从而对它重新标记。 来自辞典例句

415 interfering   

adj. 妨碍的 动词interfere的现在分词

参考例句：

• He's an interfering old busybody! 他老爱管闲事！
• I wish my mother would stop interfering and let me make my own decisions. 我希望我母亲不再干预，让我自己拿主意。

416 presumption   

n.推测，可能性，冒昧，放肆，[法律]推定

参考例句：

• Please pardon my presumption in writing to you.请原谅我很冒昧地写信给你。
• I don't think that's a false presumption.我认为那并不是错误的推测。

417 insignificant   

adj.无关紧要的，可忽略的，无意义的

参考例句：

• In winter the effect was found to be insignificant.在冬季，这种作用是不明显的。
• This problem was insignificant compared to others she faced.这一问题与她面临的其他问题比较起来算不得什么。

418 gathering   

n.集会，聚会，聚集

参考例句：

• He called on Mr. White to speak at the gathering.他请怀特先生在集会上讲话。
• He is on the wing gathering material for his novels.他正忙于为他的小说收集资料。

419 twilight   

n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期

参考例句：

• Twilight merged into darkness.夕阳的光辉融于黑暗中。
• Twilight was sweet with the smell of lilac and freshly turned earth.薄暮充满紫丁香和新翻耕的泥土的香味。