Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/287

267 TEE STREAM OF THOTTOET. 267 through the ear, while I depended solely upon my eye for acquaintance with affairs of the outside world. , . . "I have a vivid recollection of the delight I felt in watching the different scenes we passed through, observing the various phases of nature, both animate and inanimate ; though we did not, owing to my infirmity, engage in conversation. It was during those delightful rides, some two or three years before my initiation into the rudiments of written language, that I began to ask myself the question : Eow came the world into being f When this question occurred to my mind, I set myself to thinking it over a long time. My curiosity was awakened as to what was the origin of human life in its first appearance upon the earth, and of vegetable life as well, and also the cause of the existence of the earth, sun, moon, and stars. "I remember at one time when my eye fell upon a very large old stump which we happened to pass in one of our rides, I asked myself, ' Is it possible that the first man that ever came into the world rose out of that stump ? But that stump is only a remnant of a once noble mag- nificent tree, and how came that tree ? Why, it came only by beginning to grow out of the ground just like those little trees now coming up.' And I dismissed from my mind, as an absurd idea, the connection between the origin of man and a decaying old stump. . . . " I have no recollection of what it was that first suggested to me the question as to the origin of things. I had before this time gained ideas of the descent from parent to child, of the propagation of animals, and of the production of plants from seeds. The question that occurred to my mind was : whence came the first man, the first animal, and the first plant, at the remotest distance of time, before which there was no man, no animal, no plant ; since I knew they all had a beginning and an end. " It is impossible to state the exact order in which these different questions arose, i.e., about men, animals, plants, the earth, sun, moon, etc. The lower animals did not receive so much thought as was bestowed upon man and the earth ; perhaps because I put man and beast in the same class, since I believed that man would be annihilated and there was no resurrection beyond the grave, —though I am told by my mother that, in answer to my question, in the case of a deceased uncle who looked to me like a person in sleep, she had tried to make me understand that he would awake in the far future. It was my belief that man and beast derived their being from the same source, and were to be laid down in the dust in a state of annihilation. Considering the brute animal as of secondary importance, and allied to man on a lower level, man and the earth were the two things on which my mind dwelled most. " I think I was five years old, when I began to understand the de- scent from parent to child and the propagation of animals. I was nearly eleven years old, when I entered the Institution where I was ed-