Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/481

Rh any one not a disciple will examine his consciousness, he will, I think, quickly perceive that veneration or gratitude felt toward any being, implies belief in the conscious action of that being—implies ascription of a prompting motive of a high kind, and deeds resulting from it: gratitude can not be entertained toward something which is unconscious. So that the "Great Being Humanity" must be conceived as having in its incorporated form, ideas, feelings, and volitions. Naturally there follows the inquiry—"Where is its seat of consciousness?" Is it diffused throughout mankind at large? That can not be; for consciousness is an organized combination of mental states, implying instantaneous communications such as certainly do not exist throughout Humanity. Where, then, must be its center of consciousness? In France, of course, which, in the Comtean system, is to be the leading State; and naturally in Paris, to which all the major axes of the temples of Humanity are to point. Any one with adequate humor might raise amusing questions respecting the constitution of that consciousness of the Great Being supposed to be thus localized. But, preserving our gravity, we have simply to recognize the obvious truth that Humanity has no corporate consciousness whatever. Consciousness, known to each as existing in himself, is ascribed by him to other beings like himself, and, in a measure, to inferior beings; and there is not the slightest reason for supposing that there ever was, is now, or ever will be, any consciousness among men save that which exists in them individually. If, then, "the Great Being, who is the Author of all these conquests," is unconscious, the emotions of veneration and gratitude are absolutely irrelevant.

It will doubtless seem a paradox to say that human evolution with all its marvels, is to be credited neither to Humanity as an aggregate, nor to its component individuals; but the paradox will not be difficult to justify: especially if we set out with some analogies. An apt one is supplied by that "thing of beauty," the Euplectella or "Venus' flower-basket," now not uncommon as a drawing-room ornament. This fragile piece of animal architecture is not a product of any conscious creature, or of any combination of conscious creatures. It is the framework unknowingly elaborated by innumerable ciliated monads—each a simple nucleated cell, with a whip-like appendage which serves, by its waving movements, to aid the drawing in and sending out of sea-water, from which nutritive matter is obtained; and it is simply by the proclivities which these monads have toward certain modes of growth and secretion, that they form, without the consciousness of any one, or of all, this complicated city they inhabit. Again, take the case of a coral island. By it we are shown that a multitude of insignificant individuals may, by their separate actions carried on without concert, generate a structure imposing by its size and stability. One of these palm-covered atolls standing up out of vast depths in the Pacific, has been slowly built up by coral-polyps, while, through