The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Religion
The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895
Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Evolution
Some investigators have made the mistake of projecting into the
animal mind all our emotions and complicated trains of thought. Thus
Schwammerdam apparently credits the snail with remorse for the
commission of excesses. Others go to the other extreme and make
animals hardly more than mindless automata. We are warned,
therefore, by our very mode of study, to be cautious, not too
absolutely sure of our results, nor indignant at others who may take
a very different view. And yet by moving cautiously and accepting
only what seems fairly clear and evident we may arrive at very
valuable and tolerably sure results.
The human mind, and the animal mind apparently, manifests itself in
three states or functions. These are intelligence, the realm of
knowledge; susceptibility, the realm or state of feelings or
emotions; will, the power or state of choice. Let us trace first the
development of intelligence or the intellect in the animal. Let us
try to discover what kinds of knowledge are successively attained
and the mode and sequence of their attainment. Hydra appears to be
conscious of its food. It recognizes it partially by touch, perhaps
also by feeling the waves caused by its approach. It seems also to
recognize food at a little distance by a power comparable to our
sense of smell. Stronger impacts cause it to contract. It neither
sees nor hears; it probably does little or no thinking. Its
knowledge is therefore limited to the recognition of objects either
in contact with, or but slightly removed from, itself. And its
recognition of the objects is very dim and incomplete, obtained
through the sense of touch and smell.
A little higher in the animal world a rude ear has developed, first
as a very delicate organ for feeling the waves caused by approaching
food or enemies; only later as an organ of hearing. Meanwhile the
eye has been developing, to perceive the subtle ether vibrations.
The eye of the turbellaria distinguishes only light from darkness,
that of the annelid is a true visual organ. Now the brain can begin
to perceive the shape of objects at a little distance. Touch and
smell, hearing, sight; such is sequence of sense perceptions. The
sense-organs respond to continually more delicate and subtle
impacts, and cover an ever-widening range of more and more distant
objects. Up to this point intelligence has hardly included more than
sense-perceptions.
But these sense-perceptions have been all the time spurring the mind
to begin a higher work. At first it is conscious merely of objects,
and its main effort is to gain a clearer and clearer perception of
these.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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