COLLATERAL READINGS SUGGESTED IN CONNECTION WITH ESSAY VIII. Spencer's Principles of Psychology; Fiske's Cosmic Philosophy ; Daniel G. Thompson's System of Psychology; Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind; Bain's Mental Science and Mind and Body; Maudsley's Physical Basis of Mind; Clifford's Seeing and Thinking; Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals; Lindsay's Mind in the Lower Animals; Romane's Mental Evolution in Animals and Mental Evolution in Man; Binet's Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms. THE EVOLUTION OF MIND.* THE mind. - where is it, what is it and whence came it? For ages men have striven to solve these knotty problems. In studying the physical universe, we find that mocking nature played some solemn pranks, which if repeated in the psychical will account for our tardiness of progress in this direction. Immediate perceptions of sense have almost invariably been illusory. The earth seems flat and at rest, but is round and in rapid motion. The blue dome above looks like a solid arch studded with specks of light, but is in reality immense vacuity with myriads of giant globes. The sun appears to rotate round the earth, but the earth goes round the sun. All we see seems as if out of us but is in reality pictured in the brain.† Science and theology clasp hands in declaring: "This earth is but a fleeting show It required centuries of thought to triumph over the deceptions of matter. It may require other centuries to overcome those of mind. The controversy of idealism versus realism is not yet permanently settled,‡ and there are others of great importance that it will take many generations to make clear.§ Of our own minds we have direct evidence. We can only know that other minds exist by our interpretations of the movements of matter. Because of this, physical science had to precede mental. In tracing the leading features of the genesis of the first, we may derive hints as to how we should approach the last. Before men began to philosophize and build up systems of thought it is reasonable to suppose that like children they took appearances for realities. Such a mind would take it for granted that the disappearance of a body of matter by vaporization was its total disappearance, and its reappearance by condensation * COPYRIGHT, 1889, by The New Ideal Publishing Co. + Reichert's Foster's Physiology, pp. 702-704. Huxley's Critiques and Addresses, pp. 310-317. Mind, Vol. 7, pp. 30-54. § Bascom's Psychology, pp. 380-401. its creation. When they began to see that these changes were mere metamorphoses, philosophy was born. The impressions of sense became connected by speculation.* For ages after this, hypothesis after hypothesis was evolved as to the origin of matter from one or more primal forms.† All this time they went on committing the same blunder with energy, as had been done with matter. Heat, light, sound, motion and other modes were under incessant observation, but no effort was made at connecting them together. They saw motion only as gross and rectilinear. Even as late as our own age, no less a man than Mayer believed that motion ceased when it became heat.‡ Now we see motion everywhere, and the Universe appears as a "Rushing metamorphosis o'erturning all that stable is, Melts things that be to things that seem, and solid nature to a dream." The advent of the doctrine of the Correllation and Conservation of Forces made it possible for Mr. Spencer to formulate the philosophy of Universal Evolution.§ Our belief in the indestructibility of matter and continuity of motion, are but phases of our inability to conceive of the non-persistence of the force of which they are manifestations. But this inexpugnable reality has another aspect than its dimensional one. T An appreciation of this fact admonishes me of the utter fruitlessness of the effort at giving a clear conception of the evolution of the mind to those who pretend to believe in the incessant creation and annihilation of psychic states. As looking behind matter to the persistent underlying reality forces us to believe in its indestructibility, so an application of the same method of reasoning to mind leads us to an identical conclusion. Divide matter as we will, we must at every step perceive that the pieces still have dimensions.** No jugglery of thought can conceive of two non-dimensional halves uniting to make a dimensional whole. Precisely the same kind of an impossibility of thought greets us in psychology. Divide mental or psychic operations as we will and we must at every step perceive that it must remain psychic still. No jugglery of *History of the Inductive Sciences, Vol. 1, p. 43. † Rodwell's Birth of Chemistry, pp. 13-29. Tait's Recent Advances, p. 55. § Spencer's First Principles (Appleton, 1873, p. 185). Ibid, pp. 179, 184. Fiske's Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. 2, pp. 444-451. **Cooke's New Chemistry, pp. 35, 36. |