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Quickness of learning then became of importance; but so long as the faculty of generalizing is absent, associative memory, although liberating organisms from the prison of a fixed and inherited mental constitution, still pins them down to the accidental and the particular; an organism can only learn to react to those particular experiences which chance has decreed that it should have had.

The next and last salient step in evolution was a double one. Which of its two parts came first is hard to say; probably they acted reciprocally throughout. This step was, on the one hand, the attainment of the power of generalization—of reason, concept-formation, or what you will—and on the other the origin of tradition, which in its turn was made possible by the acquisition of speech and of a gregarious mode of life. By these means, the human species and its evolving ancestors were gradually enabled, first, to free experience ever more and more from the accidental and to store what was essential; and, secondly, to bring gradually more and more of the experience of the whole race to bear upon the present problem, and to plan further and further ahead, and on a larger and larger scale.