Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/343

Rh voluntary effort for the less habitual processes and activities, and on the other committing such processes and activities, to the extent that they become habitual, to the realm of the subconscious.

What is true of our bodily activities is equally true of the mental processes through which we form judgments and reach conclusions. To men in the mass, partial aspects of reality are easier to seize than complete verities; they find "concrete facts" more comprehensible than general principles; the gently undulating slopes of belief offer them a less arduous path than that which leads over the steep cliffs of knowledge; for most of them, the rosy streamers that herald morning are more beautiful than the full lights of day:

 L'homme est de glace aux vérités— II est de feu pour les mensonges!

Hence it is that in their earlier thoughts men explain the invisible parts of the external world in terms of the parts visible to them; that they confound the object with the garb woven for it by the subject; that they conceive anthropopathically of things and activities in the external world and that most of their ideas of the universe and of its parts presuppose the human organism as the source of the analogies which alone make them intelligible. There can be thus no theory of the universe, however crude, and no religious belief, however barbarous, which may not find its justification in the fact that, for a particular stage of mental ascent, it is an expression of the law of least resistance. If, moreover, the beliefs and theories of individuals and races, at first of the simplest kind, become more complex as men ascend in mental power and knowledge; and, if, as the spheres of feeling and knowing draw near to one another, each grows richer in content until in both the mind is enabled to range in a world of ideas inaccessible to man on a lower plane of development—these results are reached in every stage of the progress they constitute not only by the saving of energy through the improvement of mental operations, but also by the enlarging and perfection of the ends compassed by those operations.

The history of the concept is itself full of evidence to the same effect. In the early stage of mental development, men attach high validity to appearances, and thus form concepts which connect things only on the basis of their superficial likenesses and differences; the stage is one in which, while there are terms for the members of a class, those descriptive of the class are either very imperfect or do not exist at all—one in which, for example, there are names for particular trees, particular plants, particular animals, but no general name for tree, for plant, or for animal. Not only are objects imperfectly known in the absence of the power