Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/368

356 The external world is made up of objects in relations with each other. Nothing exists by itself, or out of relation with other things. The very attributes which constitute a thing are its relations. The perceiving mind, on the other hand, is constituted to recognize relations. By these it identifies each thing. All objects are classed by their relations of likeness and unlikeness, and all knowledge is organized on this basis. To investigate a thing is but to determine its relations. Knowledge, in short, is relative, and our thinking is all carried on in terms of relation. The infinitely extended and the infinitely minute contexture of relations which constitutes the order of nature has for its counterpart a marvelous nervous mechanism constructed to reproduce these relations. The outer world, by its forces, acts upon the senses, producing myriads of sensations, diverse in quality and intensity, which are conveyed to the great central organ of mind, the brain. This consists of the simplest elements, cells and fibers, but there are hundreds of millions of these, closely knit and bound together by commissures, so as to produce a compactly unified organism, capable of duplicating in thought the multitudinous relations of the surrounding universe. Added to this, we have to view the brain as a creation of Nature through processes which have been going forward incessantly and continuously during vast periods of time. It has been slowly evolved by long intercourse with the environing world. It used to be thought that the mind begins with the new-born creature, and it was likened to a sheet of white paper, upon which anything can be scribbled. But it is now held that the central nervous organism at birth embodies a mass of nascent activities, latent capacities, and instinctive impulses which have been inherited from ancestral generations through the experience of the race, and in which the correspondence between the relations of external phenomena and the internal relations of the mind has been progressively increasing in extent and complexity. If, now, we glance at the early processes of the unfolding mind, we shall see that this matter of relations and their classing is very deep in the mental constitution. Mind is made up of three distinct elements, the power to feel, the power to act, and the power to know, or emotion, will, and intellect. Of these, feeling is primordial, and leads to action and to knowing. At first there is only feeling; but changes of feeling arise as soon as external forces begin to act upon the susceptible infant organism. These changes of feeling are the raw material which is to be wrought into distinct consciousness. A change of feeling supplies two terms and a relation, and the discrimination of these is the earliest act of knowing. The baby cries when in pain, and sleeps sweetly when all goes well with it. Thus at the very dawn of psychical life there are established relations of likeness and unlikeness among feelings by which they are organically classed as feelings of comfort and discomfort, pleasures and pains. Discrimination of relations is thus the very germ of intelligence. Through its apparatus of sensibility, known as