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them;
and we also build one habit and its corresponding functional
modification of our organs on another, and so become dependent on
our old habits. Consequently we have to persist in them even when they
hurt us. We cannot stop breathing to avoid an attack of asthma, or to
escape drowning. We can lose a habit and discard an organ when we no
longer need them, just as we acquired them; but this process is slow
and broken by relapses; and relics of the organ and the habit long
survive its utility. And if other and still indispensable habits and
modifications have been built on the ones we wish to discard, we must
provide a new foundation for them before we demolish the old one.
This is also a slow process and a very curious one.
THE MIRACLE OF CONDENSED RECAPITULATION
The relapses between the efforts to acquire a habit are important
because, as we have seen, they recur not only from effort to effort in
the case of the individual, but from generation to generation in the case
of the race. This relapsing from generation to generation is an
invariable characteristic of the evolutionary process. For instance,
Raphael, though descended from eight uninterrupted generations of
painters, had to learn to paint apparently as if no Sanzio had ever

handled a brush before. But he had also to learn to breathe, and digest,
and circulate his blood. Although his father and mother were fully
grown adults when he was conceived, he was not conceived or even
born fully grown: he had to go back and begin as a speck of protoplasm,
and to struggle through an embryonic lifetime, during part of which he
was indistinguishable from an embryonic dog, and had neither a skull
nor a backbone. When he at last acquired these articles, he was for
some time doubtful whether he was a bird or a fish. He had to compress
untold centuries of development into nine months before he was human
enough to break loose as an independent being. And even then he was
still so incomplete that his parents might well have exclaimed 'Good
Heavens! have you learnt nothing from our experience that you come
into the world in this ridiculously elementary state? Why cant you talk
and walk and paint and behave decently?' To that question Baby
Raphael had no answer. All he could have said was that this is how
evolution or transformation happens. The time may come when the
same force that compressed the development of millions of years into
nine months may pack many more millions into even a shorter space;
so that Raphaels may be born painters as they are now born breathers
and blood circulators. But they will still begin as specks of protoplasm,
and acquire the faculty of painting in their mother's womb at quite a
late stage of their embryonic life. They must recapitulate the history of
mankind in their own persons, however briefly they may condense it.
Nothing was so astonishing and significant in the discoveries of the
embryologists, nor anything so absurdly little appreciated, as this
recapitulation, as it is now called: this power of hurrying up into
months a process which was once so long and tedious that the mere
contemplation of it is unendurable by men whose span of life is
three-score-and-ten. It widened human possibilities to the extent of
enabling us to hope that the most prolonged and difficult operation of
our minds may yet become instantaneous, or, as we call it, instinctive.
It also directed our attention to examples of this packing up of centuries
into seconds which were staring us in the face in all directions. As I
write these lines the newspapers are occupied by the exploits of a child
of eight, who has just defeated twenty adult chess players in twenty
games played simultaneously, and has been able afterwards to

reconstruct all the twenty games without any apparent effort of memory.
Most people, including myself, play chess (when they play it at all)
from hand to mouth, and can hardly recall the last move but one, or
foresee the next but two. Also, when I have to make an arithmetical
calculation, I have to do it step by step with pencil and paper, slowly,
reluctantly, and with so little confidence in the result that I dare not act
on it without 'proving' the sum by a further calculation involving more
ciphering. But there are men who can neither read, write, nor cipher, to
whom the answer to such sums as I can do is instantly obvious without
any conscious calculation at all; and the result is infallible. Yet some of
these natural arithmeticians have but a small vocabulary; are at a loss
when they have to find words for any but the