§56. Ancestral Experience
The idea that concepts arise a posteriori, after experience, is among empiricism’s oldest commitments. This experience is “timeless” in the sense that the unadulterated given is always the same, and only what opinion and superstition make of it fluctuates.
This assumption fell under suspicion with the modern theory of evolution, creating pressure to revise empiricism, as practically all the empirical philosophers after Darwin were Darwinists. One result was a new concept of experience—ancestral experience, experience extended beyond the individual into the past. As Herbert Spencer explains, the human brain “is an organized register of infinitely numerous experiences received during the evolution of life.” It is a grave error to ignore species evolution and individual development, yet all the older psychologies do just that, their theories describing adult consciousness and ignoring the question of development. They write as if “the self-conscious intellect comes to its task fully equipped,” and “No question is asked how it comes by its equipment.”48Spencer has no patience for blank-slate psychology. The whole organism is striated by evolution. How could the faculty of experience evade the struggle for existence, or not be modified by it? He repeats Condillac’s challenge to Locke (§57). “To rest with the unqualified assertion that antecedent to experience the mind is a blank is to ignore the question—whence comes the power of organizing experience?” Condillac sought his answer in language; for Spencer it is the adaptive tendency of biological evolution.49
Spencer was for a time the most famous philosopher in Britain and its empire. He was an evolutionist before Darwin, not needing Darwin to persuade him of the fact of evolution, and not accepting Darwin’s theory of natural selection, his evolutionism being closer to that of Lamarck, with useinheritance as adaptation’s primary cause.
“The inheritance of functionally- wrought modifications [i.e., acquired characteristics] is the chief and almost exclusive factor in the genesis of all the more complex instincts and all the higher mental powers.” Any organism has the potential to change its form or habits in response to the environment, which, by a mechanism nobody understood but few doubted, are inherited by offspring as unlearned dispositions.50Experience must take on a much-expanded meaning, nicely articulated by George Lewes: “Not only the individual experiences, slowly acquired, but the accumulated Experience of the race, organized in Language, condensed in Instruments and Axioms, and in what may be called the inherited Intuitions,—these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term Experience.” Adding the evolutionary point of view to the argument of Epicurus and Gassendi, Spencer proposes that “the accumulation of experiences suffices to account for the evolution of all rationality out of its simplest forms” This is his Experience Hypothesis. “The cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the frequency with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has been repeated in experience” including inherited, ancestral experience, of course. Gradually, over generations, by sheer dint of repetition, a confused mass of sensation differentiates and consolidates into multiple centers, like ruts in a country road.51
Phenomena of mental life are ever advancing in integration, heterogeneity, and definiteness. Intelligence has the same nature and law, developing from thoughtless reflex action to utmost reason. “From first to last, its growth is due to the repetition of experiences, the effects of which are accumulated, organized, and inherited.” Not just our intelligence but our very life as purposeful beings is determined (Spencer's word) by experience, whether individual or ancestral. “All actions whatever must be determined by those psychical connections which experience has gener- ated—either in the life of the individual or in that general antecedent life of which the accumulated results are organized in his constitution.”52
Spencer's Experience Hypothesis offers a new view on the dichotomy between the a priori and the a posteriori.
On an evolutionary account, especially Spencer's, where experience is phylogenetically effective as a cause of evolution, what is a priori for contemporaries can be the effect of a posteriori ancestral experience. Here is Spencer's characteristically prolix explanation:The hypothesis of Evolution supplies a reconciliation between the experience-hypothesis as commonly interpreted and the hypothesis which the transcendentalists oppose to it All intelligence is acquired though
experience, [though] we have... to expand this doctrine so as to make it include, with the experience of each individual, the experiences of all ancestral individuals... regarding these data of intelligence as a priori for the individual, but a posteriori for the entire series of individuals of which he forms the last term.53
Darwin did not dabble in epistemology and did not comment on this philosophical application of evolution, though it drew the attention of the positivists and was enrolled in their argument that the only a priori is an analytic artifact of arbitrary axioms.