VOL. II.

No. 6.

T

HERE was a time-and that not

very many centuries ago-when science occupied herself only with material nature; and even there, only with the simpler parts and parts most removed from the from the immediate wants and highest interests of man. For example: - while kingdoms and empires were crumbling, and society decaying all about her, she calmly busied herself with investigating the curious and beautiful properties of the curves made by cutting a cone in different directions. The higher and more pressing concerns of human life she left to her sister Philosophy to solve, and her sister Literature to illustrate and embody in forms of Beauty. Is it any wonder then, that she should have been taunted for her supposed earthy and groveling spirit? Is it any wonder that she became a butt for the shafts of ridicule of her nimble-witted sister Literature and an object of the lofty scorn of her imperial sister Philosophy? But she was sadly misjudged; for on these very investigations, which seemed then, little short of lunacy, are now based all our modern astronomy, and the whole art of navigation dependent thereon. She at

tacked first the most remote things, not because they were the most remote but because they were the simplest and therefore the easiest to be reduced to law and order. She avoided the nearest and dearest concerns of human life not because they were nearest and dearest, but because they were so complex and difficult that she despaired of reducing them to law. Law and order and completeness are her passiou. She is loath to undertake what she cannot do thoroughly. Meanwhile content to work in silence in her own lowly domain, taunted and misjudged century after century, with a divine patience, she bided her time, confident of final recognition. After establishing herself firmly in her first narrow limits she commenced the work of conquests of more and more complex subjects. From mathematics she passed to mechanics, then to physics, then to chemistry, reducing these successively from chaos to order. Then she extended her dominion also to biology. This brings her near to man, but not yet in his higher parts. Then she invades the domain of Brain Physiology and touches now the borders of Psychology. Last of all in these latter times she dares to in

vade also the domain of Sociology and thus touches at last the highest interests of man and the noblest department of thought, the science of social organization, of social progress, of politics and of government. Now at last her transcendent worth is acknowledged by all. For ages upon ages, like Cinderella she sat among the ashes, content to do her humble work, while her proud sisters flaunted their gaudy colors in the eyes of an admiring world. But now at last, touched by the fair wand of Reason, she is transformed into a Princess fit to govern the world.

But is it not barely possible that although now exalted into a Queen, some of her kitchen ways and kitchen thoughts still cling about her? Is it not true that having worked so long in the ashes she still imagines that all things are but different forms of dust and ashes? Does she not still look too much downward to earth instead of upward to Heaven? In a word: Is there not in modern science too strong a tendency to drag down everything to a material plane? It has been my constant effort-I deem it my highest mission in life-to resist this tendency in myself and to counteract it in others, by an appeal in the name of science-an appeal from her lower self to her higher self-from Cinderella the kitchen maid to Cinderella the Royal Princess, in a word to lift Science to the recognition of her own glorious mission -that of verifying and at the same time giving rational form and a rational basis to all our noblest beliefs and aspirations.

Meanwhile, however, it has come to pass that out of these ancient antagonisms and traditional tendencies, there has grown up two opposite modes of viewing Nature, which may be said to characterize Literature and Philosophy on the one hand and Science on the

other-the one the natural result of dealing with man in his higher activities alone, the other, of dealing at first entirely and even yet mainly with man in his lower activities. The final outcome of the one is a spiritual philosophy despising our material nature, of the other a material philosophy ignoring our spiritual nature. These two camps of thought have always been at feud, but now are preparing for final struggle. Of course the battle-ground will be the nature of man. For there, if any where, these two the spiritual and the material meet and mingle.

There are then, two extreme views— the old and the new-as to the relation of man to Nature and especially to the animal kingdom. According to the one

The

the old-there is an infinite gulf separating man from all else in Nature. difference between man and the highest animal is far greater than that between the highest animal and the lowest microbe and the phenomena in the two cases belong to entirely different orders and are therefore wholly incommensurable. Man must be set over as an equivalent not only against the whole animal kingdom, but against all Nature beside. Nature the divine revelation and man the interpreter. According to the other-the new-it is impossible to exaggerate the closeness of the connection of man to the animal kingdom. Every bone, muscle, nerve or other organ of the body and every faculty of the mind has its correspondent in animals, of which those in man are but the slightly modified form. Man has grown

up out of the animal kingdom by gradual evolution and is even yet nothing more than the highest animal.

Again: we find the same two extreme views-the old and the new- as to the organization of society and the progress of

man. According to the one-the oldthese have nothing whatever to do with any law of lower Nature. They are wholly the result of our spiritual nature, must be studied wholly apart from material laws, and can receive no assistance whatever from science. According to the other—the new-the organization of the animal body is the type of the organization of the social body, and all the principles and methods of Biology must be carried over bodily into the higher field of Sociology. Nature is one, without a break from the inorganic and dead through the organic and living up to the intellectual and moral. No permanent progress can be made in the rational knowledge i. e. the science of man, except by identifying it with that of lower nature. Human Anatomy never made any scientific progress until it became a part of comparative anatomy; nor human physiology until it became comparative Physiology. So also must psychology be studied in relation to the psychical phenomena of animals, Sociology in connection with Biology and Social Progress in connection with organic evolution before these can become truly scientific.

Now it has been often and truly said, that in all such cases of extreme mutually-excluding views, both are right and both are wrong. Each is right from its own point of view, but wrong in excluding the other point of view. Therefore a true philosophy is found only in a more comprehensive view which shall combine and reconcile the apparent opposites-not indeed by pooling their dif ferences, but by transcending them, i. e. by including what is true in both and explaining their differences. A true philosophy is not a compromise, a mere mixture of opposite extremes. It is a stereoscopic combination of two different

surface views into one solid tri-dimensional reality. Now, such a more comprehensive and therefore more rational view I am convinced, is to be found in my own view of the origin of man's spirit (of his body there can be no question). Of the origin, I say of man's spirit from the anima or soul or intelligent principle of animals-of the Pneuma of man from the Psyche of animals-by a process of evolution. According to this view, (a view which I have urged so often, and in season and sometimes perhaps out of season, in my published writings and unpublished addresses that it seems to me almost an impertinence to bring it forward again. But I have no right to think that many, or perhaps any of you, are familiar with it. When I was younger I had a great fear even horror of repeating myself, as showing poverty of thought. But I have gotten over all that now. I have learned that such fear is evidence of an over-estimate of the impressions we make on others. I have learned that in order to make any permanent impression we must give line upon line and precept upon precept, here a little there a great deal. It must be but a bare mention this time, however. Only enough to make what I say further on intelligible.) According to this view, then, spirit in embryo in the womb of nature as the anima of animals-unconscious of itself, but slowly developing through all geologic time, at last came to birth into a higher spiritual, immortal world-at last became self-conscious, self-active, free spirit in man. Thus the whole process of evolution of the organic kingdom through infinite time becomes naught else than a divine method for the creation of spirits. Can there be a grander idea of the significance of Nature than this?