Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/703

Rh and all we feel within us—the phenomena of physical Nature as well as those of the human mind—have their unsearchable roots in a cosmical life, if I dare apply the term, an infinitesimal span of which only is offered to the investigation of man. And even this span is only knowable in part. We can trace the development of a nervous system, and correlate with it the parallel phenomena of sensation and thought. We see with undoubting certainty that they go hand in hand. But we try to soar in a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connection between them. An Archimedean fulcrum is here required which the human mind cannot command; and the effort to solve the problem, to borrow an illustration from an illustrious friend of mine, is like the effort of a man trying to lift himself by his own waistband. All that has been here said is to be taken in connection with this fundamental truth. When "nascent senses" are spoken of, when "the differentiation of a tissue at first vaguely sensitive all over" is spoken of, and when these processes are associated with "the modification of an organism by its environment," the same parallelism, without contact, or even approach to contact, is implied. There is no fusion possible between the two classes of facts—no motor energy in the intellect of man to carry it without logical rupture from the one to the other.

Further, the doctrine of evolution derives man, in his totality, from the interaction of organism and environment through countless ages past. The human understanding, for example—the faculty which Mr. Spencer has turned so skillfully round upon its own antecedents—is itself a result of the play between organism and environment through cosmic ranges of time. Never surely did prescription plead so irresistible a claim. But then it comes to pass that, over and above his understanding, there are many other things appertaining to man whose prescriptive rights are quite as strong as that of the understanding itself. It is a result, for example, of the play of organism and environment that sugar is sweet and that aloes are bitter, that the smell of henbane differs from the perfume of a rose. Such facts of consciousness (for which, by-the-way, no adequate reason has ever yet been rendered) are quite as old as the understanding itself, and many other things can boast an equally ancient origin. Mr. Spencer at one place refers to that most powerful of passions—the amatory passion—as one which, when it first occurs, is antecedent to all relative experience whatever, and we may pass its claim as being at least as ancient and as valid as that of the understanding itself. Then there are such things woven into the texture of man as the feeling of awe, reverence, wonder—and not alone the sexual love just referred to, but the love of the beautiful, physical and moral, in Nature, poetry, and art. There is also that deep-set feeling which, since the earliest dawn of history, and probably for ages prior to all history, incorporated itself in the religions of the world. You who have escaped from these