Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions. — John Shaqi
Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy
Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.
Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy; Political science; Science
Returning to the thread of our exposition, we have next to trace,
throughout organic progress, this same all-pervading principle. And
here, where the evolution of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous was
first observed, the production of many effects by one cause is least
easy to demonstrate. The development of a seed into a plant, or an ovum
into an animal, is so gradual, while the forces which determine it are
so involved, and at the same time so unobtrusive, that it is difficult
to detect the multiplication of effects which is elsewhere so obvious.
But, guided by indirect evidence, we may safely conclude that here too
the law holds. Note, first, how numerous are the changes which any
marked action works upon an adult organism--a human being, for instance.
An alarming sound or sight, besides the impressions on the organs of
sense and the nerves, may produce a start, a scream, a distortion of
the face, a trembling consequent on general muscular relaxation, a burst
of perspiration, a rush of blood to the brain, followed possibly by
arrest of the heart's action and by syncope; and if the subject be
feeble, an indisposition with its long train of complicated symptoms may
set in. Similarly in cases of disease. A minute portion of the small-pox
virus introduced into the system, will, in a severe case, cause, during
the first stage, rigors, heat of skin, accelerated pulse, furred tongue,
loss of appetite, thirst, epigastric uneasiness, vomiting, headache,
pains in the back and limbs, muscular weakness, convulsions, delirium,
&c.; in the second stage, cutaneous eruption, itching, tingling, sore
throat, swelled fauces, salivation, cough, hoarseness, dyspnoea, &c.;
and in the third stage, oedematous inflammations, pneumonia, pleurisy,
diarrhoea, inflammation of the brain, ophthalmia, erysipelas, &c.:
each of which enumerated symptoms is itself more or less complex.
Medicines, special foods, better air, might in like manner be instanced
as producing multipled results. Now it needs only to consider that the
many changes thus wrought by one force upon an adult organism, will be
in part paralleled in an embryo organism, to understand how here also,
the evolution of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous may be due to
the production of many effects by one cause. The external heat, which,
falling on a matter having special proclivities, determines the first
complications of the germ, may, by acting on these, superinduce further
complications; upon these still higher and more numerous ones; and so on
continually: each organ as it is developed serving, by its actions and
reactions on the rest, to initiate new complexities. The first
pulsations of the foetal heart must simultaneously aid the unfolding
of every part. The growth of each tissue, by taking from the blood
special proportions of elements, must modify the constitution of the
blood; and so must modify the nutrition of all the other tissues. The
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