Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, June 1899: Volume LVVarious
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, June 1899: Volume LV
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
It is a great pity that at this critical moment a very simple
consideration did not occur to this troubled spirit. When we read the
Sermon on the Mount we read "words, words, words"; when we read some
horrible piece of profanity or indecency it is again "words, words,
words"; when we read the demonstration of a proposition in Euclid it
is "words, words, words"; and, again, when we take up Tennyson's In
Memoriam we find that its whole tissue is "words, words, words." But
would it tend in the least to lessen one's reverence for the Sermon on
the Mount to be reminded that it was constructed out of the same
verbal elements as the piece of profanity? or would it diminish our
admiration for In Memoriam to be told that it was constructed of words
just like the dullest piece of prose? If not, then why should one be
so terribly disconcerted and depressed to find that all our mental
life finds its basis in vibrations? Or why should the inference be
drawn that, because the basis is one, all that reposes on it must also
be one in character and meaning? Is our delight in the lily or the
rose impaired by the reflection that it springs from the same soil
that produces noisome weeds; or do we gaze on the humming bird with
less admiration because it flies in the same atmosphere as the bat?
Why should "vibrations" not be the condition of existence of one
mental phenomenon as well as of another? Surely the very fact that Dr.
Crozier classes all the feelings he mentions as mental affections
should prepare him to believe that they have a common basis. But how
feelings shall be classified and ranked _after they have taken form_
is a question precisely similar to the question how the various
combinations of words should be classified and ranked. In the latter
case words are the basis of them all, but we say: "This is an epic
poem; this is a moral essay; this is an immoral novel; this is a silly
joke; this is a market report." Are these distinctions illusory
because words are the basis and substance of all these various forms
of composition? Does the poem lose anything of its beauty, or the
essay anything of its ethical value, because each was not composed of
elements altogether peculiar to itself? The solid globe itself was
once a diffused nebula, but we do not on that account find a less
varied beauty in flower and tree, in hillside and running brook and
grandly flowing river.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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