and separate tribal ancestors, he hardly cared so much as to hazard a
passing speculation. With splendid self-restraint he confined his
attention almost entirely to the more manageable and practical problem
of the origin of species by natural selection, which lay then and there
open for solution before him. Taking for granted the existence of the
original organism or group of organisms, the fact of reproduction, and
the tendency of such reproduction to beget increase in a geometrical
ratio, he deduced from these elementary given factors the necessary
corollary of survival of the fittest, with all its marvellous and
far-reaching implications of adaptation to the environment and specific
distinctions. By doing so, he rendered conceivable the mechanism of
evolution in the organic world, thus bringing another great aspect of
external nature within the range of the developmental as opposed to the
miraculous philosophy of the cosmos.
Psychology, once more, in the hands of Herbert Spencer and his
followers, not wholly unaided by Darwin himself, has extended the
self-same evolutionary treatment to the involved and elusive phenomena
of mind, and has shown how from the simplest unorganised elements of
feeling, the various mental powers and faculties as we now know them,
both on the intellectual and on the emotional side, have been slowly
built up in the long and ever-varying interaction between the sentient
organism and the natural environment. It has traced the first faint
inception of a nervous system as a mere customary channel of
communication between part and part; the gradual growth of fibre and
ganglion; the vague beginnings of external sense-organ and internal
brain; the final perfection of eye and ear, of sight and hearing, of
pleasure and pain, of intellect and volition. It has thus done for the
subjective or mental half of our complex nature what biology, as
conceived by Darwin, has done for the physical or purely organic half;
it has traced the origin and development of mind, without a single
break, from its first faint and half-unconscious manifestation in the
polyp or the jelly-fish to its final grand and varied outcome in the
soul of the poet or the intellect of the philosopher.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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