The Doctrine of Evolution: Its Basis and Its ScopeCrampton, Henry Edward
Science
The Doctrine of Evolution: Its Basis and Its Scope
Crampton, Henry Edward
Evolution
In the direct treatment of the facts and principles of mental evolution we
can use exactly the same classification and subdivisions of the materials
of study as heretofore, because psychological data are the correlates of
material organic systems, and also because the former, being natural
phenomena, are subject to the methods of analysis which can be employed
for any series of objects that have undergone evolution. Separating the
matter of fact from the question as to the method, and recalling the main
bodies of evidence as to the reality of evolution, we may establish four
sections of the subject before us: these are (1) the anatomy, (2) the
embryology, and (3) "palaeontology" of mind, and (4) an inquiry into the
way nature deals with the psychical characteristics of organisms in
accomplishing their evolution. To specify more particularly, it is
possible in the first place to compare the activities belonging to the
category of mental and nervous operations, displayed by man and other
organisms, and the results form the subject of comparative descriptive
psychology; the second division, namely, developmental or genetic
psychology, deals with the sequence of events in the life of a single
individual by which the infantile and adolescent types of mind become
adult intellectuality; in the third place, in speaking of the palaeontology
of mind, the phrase is used to refer to the varied and changing mental
abilities of human races in historic and prehistoric times as they may be
demonstrated and determined by the evidences of the culture of such
earlier epochs. In considering the matter of method, the questions are
whether variation, inheritance, and selection are as real in the world of
mental phenomena as they are in the material world, and whether the laws
are the same or similar in the two cases. We shall learn how the results
of such studies prove with convincing clearness, first, that the contents
of the individual mind and of the minds of various human races are truly
the products of natural evolution, and second, that the human mind differs
only in degree from that of lower organisms, and not in kind or
fundamental nature.
* * * * *
When the operations of human mental life are examined, they include what
are called processes of _reason_ as apparently distinctive elements. The
lower mammalia exhibit a simpler order of "mentality" denoted
_intelligence_, while the nervous processes of still simpler forms are
called _instinctive_ and _reflex_ activities. These are the terms of the
comparative array of psychology which are to be separately examined and
classified, and to be brought into an evolutionary sequence if
common-sense directs us to do so.
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