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 my opinion the individual argument renders the monistic conception of
mind and matter unassailable. The food that we may eat and the water we
may drink are dead, and as such they display absolutely no evidence of
nervous or mental processes. When they enter our bodies, they with other
foods replenish the various tissues, and among these the parts of the
brain. In a material sense they become actual living protoplasm, replacing
the worn-out substances destroyed during our previous thinking; and their
properties are combined to make brain and thought, to play for a time
their part in life, and to pass back into the world of dead, unthinking
things. Every one of us knows that hunger reduces our ability to think
clearly and fully, and every one knows also that mental vigor is renewed
when fresh supplies of nourishment reach the brain. What can be the source
of mentality, if it is not something brought in from the outer world along
with the chemical substances which taken singly are devoid of mind?
Scientific monism frankly replies that it is unable to find another
origin.
We are thus brought to recognize, not only the continuity taught by
organic evolution, but also the uniformity of the materials constituting
the entire sensible world, inasmuch as the ultimate unit of all nervous
phenomena is the reflex act of a protoplasmic mass, which itself is a
synthesis of properties inhering in the chemical elements making up living
matter. Among inorganic things the mind-stuff units are combined in
relatively simple ways, and the "stuff" does not give any outward
evidences of "mind" as such. Living things are almost infinitely complex
as regards their chemical organization, and even in the very lowest of
them we can discern a cell-reflex element which, combined with others like
it, forms the unit of the compounds we call instinct, intelligence, and
reason. Hence through an analysis of mental evolution we are enabled to
form the larger conception of a continuous universe whose ultimate
elements are the same everywhere.
VII
SOCIAL EVOLUTION AS A BIOLOGICAL PROCESS
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