Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 106.djvu/640

630 wonders and its transformations, there had been no bit of matter possessing the power that the human brain-cortex possesses till man was developed. The reason of man, no matter how slow it may have been in finding itself, was a new thing in the world, apparently not contemplated by nature's plan, as, in a sense, it is at war with that plan, and a reversal of it.

Just as life was a new thing in the inorganic world, contravening the ordinary laws of matter, expressing a kind of energy not derived from gravitation, making chemical and physical forces its servants, so was the reason of man a new thing, evolved, of course, from preexisting conditions, or animal automatism, but, when fairly differentiated, a new mode of energy, making its possessor a new kind of animal, reversing or annulling many of the laws that have sway in the rest of the animal kingdom, defeating the law of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, rising superior to climate and to geographical conditions, controlling and changing his environment, making servants of the natural forces about him; in short, fairly facing and mastering nature in a way no other animal had ever done.

The conditions that have limited the increase and spread of the other animals, have been in a measure triumphed over by man. The British scientist I have quoted above, Ray Lankester, has described man as nature's rebel—he defies her and wrests her territory from her. 'Where nature says, "Die!" man says, "I will live." According to the law previously in universal operation, man should have been limited in geographical area, killed by extreme cold or heat, subject to starvation if one kind of diet were unobtainable, and should have been unable to increase and multiply, just as arc his animal relatives, without losing his specific structure and acquiring new physical characters according to the requirements of the new conditions into which he strayed—should have perished except on the condition of becoming a new morphological species.'

All this because man in a measure rose (why did he rise? who or what insured his rising?) above the state of automatism of the lower orders. His blind animal intelligence became conscious human intelligence. It was a metamorphosis, as strictly so as anything in nature. In man, for the first time, an animal turned around and looked upon itself and considered its relations to the forces outside of self. In other words, it developed mental vision; it paused to consider; it began to understand.

The mechanism called instinct gave place slowly to the psychic principle of reason and free will. Trouble began with the new gift. This was the real fall of man, a fall from a state of animal innocence and non-self-consciousness to a state of error and struggle—thenceforth man knew good from evil, and was driven out of the paradise of animal innocency. Reason opened the door to error, and in the same moment it opened the door to progress. If failure became possible, success also became possible. The animal with his instincts was doomed to a ceaseless round of unprogressive life; man with his reason had open to him the possibility of progressive mastery over nature. His race-mind developed slowly, from period to period, going through an unfolding and a discipline analogous to that of a child from infancy to manhood: many failures, many sorrows, much struggle; but slowly, oh, so slowly, has he emerged into the light of reason in which we find him now. The price the lower animals pay for unerring instinct is the loss of progress; the price man pays for his erring reason is the chance of failure.