A person 40 years old has an additional
_experience_ of a quarter of a century, and so has a larger mental
content, but his intelligence is still nearly at the 16-year level.
Mental activity is the effect, not the cause, of mental growth or
development. Education merely turns inherent mental powers to good
account; it makes very little change in those powers themselves. To
suppose that a father can, by study, raise his innate level of
intelligence and transmit it at the new level to his son, is a naive
idea which finds no warrant in the known facts of mental development.
2. In his entire conception of the storing-up and transmission of
energy, Mr. Redfield has fallen victim to a confusion of ideas due to
the use of the same word to mean two different things. He thinks of
energy as an engineer; he declares the body-cell is a storage battery;
he believes that the athlete by performing work stores up energy in his
body (in some mysterious and unascertainable way) just as the clock
stores up energy when it is wound. The incorrectness of supposing that
the so-called energy of a man is of that nature, is remarkable. If,
hearing Bismarck called a man of iron, one should analyze his remains to
find out how much more iron he contained than ordinary men, it would be
a performance exactly comparable to Mr.
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