Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/26

22 bodies of the parents generate the body of the child, and that correspondingly the souls of the parents generate the soul of the child. Now we know that the child comes from germ cells which are not made by the bodies of the parents, but which have arisen by the division of antecedent germ cells. Every cell comes from a preexisting cell by a process of division, and every germ cell comes from a preexisting germ cell. Consequently it is not possible to hold that the body generates germ cells, nor that the soul generates souls. The only possible scientific position is that the mind (or soul) as well as the body develops from the germ.

No fact in human experience is more certain than that the mind develops by gradual and natural processes from a simple condition which can scarcely be called mind at all; no fact in human experience is fraught with greater practical and philosophical significance than this; and yet no fact is more generally disregarded. We know that the greatest men of the race were once babies, embryos, germ cells, and that the greatest minds in human history were once the minds of babies, embryos and germ cells, and yet this stupendous fact has had but little influence on our beliefs as to the nature of man and of mind. We rarely think of Plato and Aristotle, of Shakespeare and Newton, of Pasteur and Darwin, except in their full epiphany, and yet we know that when each of these was a child he "thought as a child and spake as a child," and when he was a germ cell he behaved as a germ cell.

The development of the mind from the activities of the germ cells is certainly most wonderful and mysterious, but probably no more so than the development of the complicated body of the adult animal from the structures of the germ. Both belong to the same order of phenomena and there is no more reason for supposing that the mind is supernaturally created than that the body is. Indeed, we know that the mind is formed by a process of development, and the stages of this development are fairly well known. There is nowhere in the entire course of mental development a sudden appearance of psychical process, but rather a gradual development of these from simpler and simpler beginnings. No detailed study has been made of the reactions of human germ cells and embryos, but there is every reason to believe that these reactions are simpler in the embryo and germ cell than in the infant, and they are generally similar to the reactions of the germ cells and embryos of other animals and to the behavior of many lower organisms.

A few years ago such a statement would have been branded as "materialism" and promptly rejected without examination by those who are frightened by names. But the general spread of the scientific spirit is shown not only by the growing regard for evidence, but also by the decreasing power of epithets. "Materialism," like many another ghost, fades away into thin air or at least loses many of its terrors, when closely scrutinized. But the statement that mind develops from the germ cells is not an affirmation of materialism, for while it identifies the origin of