Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/580

 568 LESTEE F. WAED : the human brain as another, and one of the best marked, of the great cosmic strides that have characterised the course of evolu- tion and belong to the legitimate methods of nature. It is, for example, only to a limited extent and in the most general way that we can apply the same canons to the organic as to the inorganic world. It is" usually, but falsely, supposed that the student of biology need know nothing of physics, the assump- tion being that they have nothing in common. While this error is fatal to all fundamental acquaintance with the laws of life, it well illustrates the immensity of the advance from one realm to the other. The same could be said, in varying degrees of obvious- ness, of every one of the ascending steps to which reference has been made. I freely admit that the theologians and meta- physicians commit the most fatal error in treating the soul, or mind, as independent of the body, but this enormous fallacy is scarcely greater than that of the modern evolutionist, who, finding out their dependence, ignores the magnitude of the step by which mind was made a property of body, and proceeds as though no new factor had entered into the world. But all this may be regarded as mere generality. Let us come to something more specific. It has always been a marvel to my comprehension that wise men and philosophers, when smitten with the specious logic of the laissez faire school, can close their eyes to the most obtrusive fact that civilisation presents. In spite of the influence of philo- sophy, all forms of which have thus far been negative and nihi- listic, the human animal, with his growing intellect, has still ever realised the power that is vouchsafed through mind, and has ever exercised that power. Philosophy would have long since robbed him of it and caused his early extermination from the earth but for the persistence, through heredity, of the impulse to exercise in self-preservation every power in his possession ; by which practice alone he first gained his ascendancy ages before philosophy began. The great fact, then, to which I allude is that, in spite of all philosophy, whether niythologic, metaphysical, or naturalistic, declaring that man must and can do nothing, he has, from the very dawn of his intelligence, been transforming the entire sur- face of the planet he inhabits. No other animal performs any- thing comparable to what man performs. This is solely because no other possesses the developed psychic faculty. If we analyse mind into its two departments, sense and in- tellect, we shall see that it is through this latter faculty that these results are accomplished. If we inquire more closely into the mode by which intellect operates, we shall find that it serves as a guiding power to those natural forces with which it is ac- quainted (and no others), directing them into channels of human advantage. If we seek for a single term by which to characterise with precision the nature of this process, we find this in Inven-