Evolution; Knowledge, Theory of; Philosophy and religion
aboriginal music with a sample of modern music—even an ordinary song for
the piano; which we find to be relatively highly heterogeneous, not only
in respect of the varieties in the pitch and in the length of the notes,
the number of different notes sounding at the same instant in company
with the voice, and the variations of strength with which they are
sounded and sung, but in respect of the changes of key, the changes of
time, the changes of _timbre_ of the voice, and the many other
modifications of expression. While between the old monotonous
dance-chant and a grand opera of our own day, with its endless
orchestral complexities and vocal combinations, the contrast in
heterogeneity is so extreme that it seems scarcely credible that the one
should have been the ancestor of the other.
* * * * *
§ 52. Were they needed, many further illustrations might be cited. Going
back to the early time when the deeds of the god-king, chanted and
mimetically represented in dances round his altar, were further narrated
in picture-writings on the walls of temples and palaces, and so
constituted a rude literature, we might trace the development of
Literature through phases in which, as in the Hebrew Scriptures it
presents in one work, theology, cosmogony, history, biography, civil
law, ethics, poetry; through other phases in which, as in the Iliad, the
religious, martial, historical, the epic, dramatic, and lyric elements
are similarly commingled; down to its present heterogeneous development,
in which its divisions and subdivisions are so numerous and varied as to
defy complete classification. Or we might track the evolution of
Science: beginning with the era in which it was not yet differentiated
from Art, and was, in union with Art, the handmaid of Religion; passing
through the era in which the sciences were so few and rudimentary, as to
be simultaneously cultivated by the same philosophers; and ending with
the era in which the genera and species are so numerous that few can
enumerate them, and no one can adequately grasp even one genus. Or we
might do the like with Architecture, with the Drama, with Dress. But
doubtless the reader is already weary of illustrations; and my promise
has been amply fulfilled. I believe it has been shown beyond question,
that that which the German physiologists have found to be the law of
organic development, is the law of all development. The advance from the
simple to the complex, through a process of successive differentiations,
is seen alike in the earliest changes of the Universe to which we can
reason our way back, and in the earliest changes which we can
inductively establish; it is seen in the geologic and climatic evolution
of the Earth, and of every single organism on its surface; it is seen in
the evolution of Humanity, whether contemplated in the civilized
individual, or in the aggregation of races; it is seen in the evolution
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