Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/446



, with all its wonders, has presented no more remarkable spectacle than the order of its own development in time, to which Comte first drew attention, namely, the emergence of the special sciences in the order of their remoteness from man. Man constructed a science of numbers, of the stars, of molar and molecular masses, of plants, of stones, and of creeping things, before he realized that he was himself an object capable of receiving scientific attention. This anomaly is doubtless due to the fact that always and everywhere man has been at the head of the series of nature, and his superiority to the lower orders of life has been so obvious as to generate in him the conceit that he had nothing in common with them. Every savage tribe, until disturbed by civilization, imagines that it occupies the very center of the earth, and that it is the most perfect specimen of the human race. Its river is the "Father of Waters," its mountain the "Navel of the Earth." The Chinese call their country the "Flower of the Center," and themselves the "Sons of heaven," and the nations bordering on the "Celestial Empire" they know as "dogs," "swine," "demons," and "savages."

The earliest disturbance of this anthropocentric view came in illusions concerning his relation to the supernatural to which man was subjected through the possession of an elaborate nervous organization; but these also accentuated his tendency to separate himself in thought from the objects surrounding him. And scientific interest in man has, even in these latter days, been so far overshadowed and impeded by an interest in his relation to a spirit world that a denomination of men as "good and bad," like the farmer's classification of animals as "stock and vermin," has been too readily accepted as practically covering the case.