Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other EssaysCarpenter, Edward
Philosophy
Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays
Carpenter, Edward
Civilization; Crime; Evolution; Science
Yet the man knows of himself that he _is_ a unity; he knows that all
parts of his body have relation to _him_, and to each other; he knows
that his senses of sight and hearing and touch and taste and smell are
conjoined in the focus of his individual life, in his "I am;" he knows
that all his faculties and powers, however much they may belong to
different planes, spiritual or material, or may come under the
inquisition of different Sciences, have an order of their own among each
other--that there _is_ an ultimate Science of them--even though he be
not yet wholly versed in it. And he knows, moreover, that in a grain of
dust, or in an emerald, or in an orange, or in any object of Nature, the
different attributes of the object--which the Sciences thus treat of
separately--are only the reflexion of his different senses; so that the
problem of the conjunction of different attributes in a body comes back
to the same problem of the union of various senses and powers in
himself--each individual object being only a case, externalised as it
were, and made a matter of consciousness, of the general relation to
each other of his own sensations and feelings. Knowing all his--I
say--he sees that the understanding of Nature in general and of the laws
or relations which he thinks he perceives among external things must
always depend on the relations and laws which he tacitly assumes, or
which he is directly conscious of, as existing between the various parts
of his own being; and that the ultimate truth which Science--the divine
Science--is really in search of is a moral or psychologic Truth--an
understanding of what man is, and the discovery of the true relation to
each other of all his faculties--involving all experience, and an
exercise of every faculty physical, intellectual, emotional and
spiritual, instead of one set of faculties only.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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