EXFOLIATION

"Creation's incessant unrest, exfoliation."

WHITMAN.

I think it may perhaps be agreed, once for all, that the human mind is

incapable of really defining even the smallest fact of nature. The

simplest thing, or event, baffles us at the last. It is like trying to

look at the front and back of a mirror at the same time. The utmost

squinting avails not. The ego and the non-ego dance eluding through

creation. To catch them both in any mortal object and pin them there,

surpasses our powers. And yet they are there. Montaigne quotes somewhere

the words of S. Augustine: _Modus quo corporibus adhaerent spiritus ...

omnino mirus est, nec comprehendi ab homine potest; et hoc ipse homo

est_. "The manner whereby spirits adhere to bodies is altogether

wonderful, and cannot be conceived of by men; and yet this _is_ man."

Man himself contains, or rather is, the reconcilement of this and

numberless other contradictions. We actually every day perform and

exhibit miracles which the mental part of us is utterly powerless to

grapple with. Yet the solution, the intelligent solution and

understanding of them _is_ in us; only it involves a higher order of

consciousness than we usually deal with--a consciousness possibly which

includes and transcends the ego and the non-ego, and so can envisage

both at the same time and equally--a fourth-dimensional consciousness to

whose gaze the interiors of solid bodies are exposed like mere

surfaces--a consciousness to whose perception some usual antitheses like

cause and effect, matter and spirit, past and future, simply do not

exist. I say these higher orders of consciousness are in us waiting for

their evolution; and, until they evolve, we are powerless really to

understand anything of the world around us.

Meanwhile, since we _must_ have formulæ and generalisations to think by,

we are fain to accept our local views, and look on the world from this

side or from that. Sometimes we are idealists, sometimes we are

materialists; sometimes we believe in mechanics, sometimes in human or

spiritual forces. The science of the last fifty years has, as pointed

out in a preceding paper, looked at things more from the mechanical than

the distinctively human side--from the point of view of the non-ego,

rather than of the ego. Reacting from an extreme tendency towards a

subjective view of phenomena, which characterised the older

speculations, and fearing to be swayed by a kind of partiality towards

himself, the modern scientist has endeavoured to remove the human and

conscious element from his observations of Nature. And he has done

valuable work in this way--but of course has been betrayed into a

corresponding narrowness.

In fact the main scientific doctrine of the day, Evolution, is obviously

suffering from this treatment, and the following remarks are merely a

few notes by way of suggestion of some things which may be said on its

more specially human side. For since each man is a part of nature, and

in that sense a part also of the evolution-process, his own subjective

experience ought at least to throw some light on the conditions under

which evolution takes place, and to contribute something towards an

understanding of the problem.

If the question is: What is the cause of Variation among animals? some

approximation towards an answer ought to be got by each person asking

himself, "Why do I vary?" Why--he might say--am I a different person

from what I was ten years ago, or when I was a boy? Why have I varied in

one direction and my brothers and sisters from the same nest in other

directions? Though my individual consciousness only covers the small

ground of my own life, and does not extend back to that of my father or

forward to that of my son, still the intimate knowledge that I have of

the forces acting on me during that short period may help me to an

understanding of the forces that bring about the modification of men and

animals at large, and the discovery of some laws of my own growth may

reveal to me the laws of race-growth.

In answer to such a question, it would speedily appear that there were

two general causes determining direction of change or growth in the

individual, which might be conveniently distinguished from each

other--an external and an internal. In the first place the supposed

person might say, "External conditions forced me along these lines. My

father was a town artisan, but he apprenticed me to a farmer. I grew up

a farmer's boy, and became an agricultural type as you see. I did not

particularly care for farming, sometimes indeed I would have been glad

to be out of it; but practically I succumbed to circumstances, and here

I am." But in the second place he might answer thus:--"My father was

himself a farmer; I was early used to the craft, and should no doubt

have grown up in it, had I not hated it like poison. I loved music,

broke away from home, joined a band, got on the musical staff of a small

theatre, and am now a professional musician. My frame is comparatively

slight, and my hands are of the nervous type, as you see. Of course, I

have some of the old agricultural stock left in me, but I feel that that

is dying out." The one cause would be a change of external conditions,

forcing the man to accommodate himself to them; the other would be a

change of internal conditions, an inward growth, expressing itself first

in the form of an intense desire, and compelling the man to change

himself and probably also his environment in obedience to it. Two such

general sets of causes, I say, could be roughly distinguished from each

other; and probably indeed are recognised less or more distinctly by

everyone as acting to modify his life. Nor can the life of a man at any

time be said to be ruled by one of these forces alone. No man is

modified by external conditions alone, without any play or reaction of

inner needs and desires and growth from within; nor is any man

transformed in obedience to an inner expansion without sundry lets and

hindrances from without. The two forces are in constant play upon one

another; but in some ways that would appear to be the more important

which proceeds from the Man (or creature) himself, since this is

obviously vital and organic to him, and therefore the most consistent

and reliable factor in his modification, while the external

force--arising from various and remote causes--must rather be regarded

as discontinuous and accidental.

I propose, therefore, in these few pages to consider especially this

inner force producing modification in man and animals--to try and find

out of what nature it is, what is the law, and what are the limits of

its action--premising always, as already suggested, that this

distinction between "inner" and "outer," which is convenient and easy to

handle on certain planes of thought, may ultimately, and in the last

resort, prove very difficult or even impossible to maintain.

It is often said by Biologists that _function precedes

organisation_--that is, man fights with his fellows before he makes

weapons to fight with; the rudimentary animal digests food (as in the

case of the amoeba) before it acquires a stomach or organ of digestion;

it sees or is sensitive to light before it grows an eye; in society

letters are carried by private hands before an organised postal system

is created. Such facts properly considered are of vital importance. They

show us, as it were by a sign-post, the direction of creation. They show

how any new thing or modification of an old thing may come into being.

They may be supplemented by a second statement--namely that _desire

precedes function_. That is, man desires to injure his fellow before he

actually fights with him; he experiences the wish to communicate with

distant friends before ever he thinks of sending such a thing as a

letter; the amoeba craves for food first, and circumvents its prey

afterwards. Desire, or inward change, comes first, action follows, and

organisation or outward structure is the result.

In man this "order of creation," if it may so be called, _i.e._, from

within outwards, is very marked. Whenever a man creates anything new he

pursues it; when he builds a house, for instance, or composes a poem or

piece of music, or designs an Alpine tunnel, or whatever it may be. The

order seems to be: first, a feeling--a dim want or desire; then the

feeling becomes conscious of itself, takes shape in thought; the thought

becomes more defined and issues in a distinct plan; the plan is

committed to paper, models are made, etc.; and finally the actual work

is begun and completed. The process appears as a movement from within

outwards--the earliest and most authentic discernible source of the

movement being a feeling--(though there may lie something behind that).

Even in ordinary action the same order is manifest; for, though of

course _every_ action is not preceded by desire--since we know that

actions soon become habitual and more or less unconscious--still a vast

number of them are immediately so preceded; and in the case of any

action that is _new_, either to the individual or to the race, its

inception is generally accompanied by effort so painful that it would

not be exerted unless the desire were very strong. The difficulty which

a man experiences in learning any new art, and the records of the many

failures, struggles, oppositions, persecutions, etc., which have

attended every new invention or innovation of any kind in human history,

afford plenty of evidence of this last point. Certainly the effort that

accompanies a new action is not always faced so much from sheer desire

of the new thing itself as from fear perhaps of something else--as it

may be contended that monkeys did not take to climbing trees because

they loved trees, but because they feared the beasts below, or that the

giraffe did not stretch its neck because it particularly desired to feed

on leaves, as because it could not get food any other way--but still,

even in these cases the desire may be said to exist, though it is

secondary--being founded upon another and more elementary desire--the

desire namely of escaping pain or obtaining food. In either case a

desire of some kind is a precedent condition of the new action. And so

as we know of no case of a new action coming into play without being

preceded by desire, we seem to be justified in supposing that all our

actions when they were first initiated (in our forefathers, if not in

ourselves) were so preceded. If this is so, then, since function is

always preceded by desire, and organisation is preceded by function,

organisation must necessarily be preceded by desire. And if this is the

order of creation in man, should we not reasonably look in this

direction for the key to the variation of animals and the order of

creation in general?[39]

If a farmer's son is occasionally born who hates farming and loves

music, and who ultimately through the force of his desire (driving him

into oppositions and difficulties and penurious struggles) transforms

himself into a musician, is it not also likely that occasionally an

animal is born who hates the customs of his tribe, and at last (also

through struggles) transforms himself into something else? Even if he

does not succeed (the animal) in entirely transforming himself, he

likely transmits the desire in some degree to his descendants, and the

transformation is thus carried on and completed later. For everywhere

among the animals there _is_ desire, of some kind or another, obviously

acting; and if in man, by our own experience, desire is the precursor

and first expression of growth, is there any reason why it should not

also be so among animals? Lamarck gives the instance--among others--of a

gasteropod; how the need or desire of touching bodies in front of it as

it crawled along would result in the formation of tentacles. The

gasteropod, he says, would keep making efforts to feel with the front of

its head, and the determination of consciousness that way would be

accompanied by a supply of nervous and other fluids, which would nourish

the part and cause growth there--the _form_ of the growth continuing in

the same way to be determined by need--till at last two or more

tentacles would appear. True, the inward determinations of consciousness

may not be so vivid and varied in animals as they are in men; but they

are persistent, and by the very cumulative force of habit which is so

strong in animals, must at length penetrate down through function into

organisation and external form. Who shall say that the lark, by the mere

love of soaring and singing in the face of the sun, has not altered the

shape of its wings, or that the forms of the shark or of the gazelle are

not the long-stored results of character leaning always in certain

directions, as much as the forms of the miser or the libertine are among

men?

Such modification as this is very different from the "survival of the

fittest" of the Darwinian evolution theory. We may fairly suppose that

both kinds of modification take place; but the latter is a sort of easy

success won by an external accident of birth--a success of the kind that

would readily be lost again; while the former is the uphill fight of a

nature that has grown inwardly and wins expression for itself in spite

of external obstacles--an expression which therefore is likely to be

permanent. If the progenitors of man took to going upright on two legs

instead of on all fours, merely because a few of them by _chance_ were

born with a talent for that position, which enabled them to escape the

fanged and pursuing beasts, then when this danger was removed they might

have plumped down again into the old attitude; but if the change was

part and parcel of a true evolution, the fulfilment of a positive desire

for the upright position, a true _unfolding_ of a higher form latent

within--an organic growth of the creature itself, then, though the

moment of the evolution of this particular faculty might be determined

by the fanged beasts, the fact of such evolution could not be determined

by them. Besides, are we to suppose that Man, the lord and ruler of the

animals, came merely by way of _escape_ from the animals? Do lords and

rulers generally come so? Was it fear that made him a man? Were it not

likelier that in that case he would have turned into a worm? He would

have escaped better perhaps that way. Is it not rather probable that it

was some nobler power that worked transforming--some dim desire and

prevision of a more perfect form, the desire itself being the first

consciousness of the urge of growth in that direction--that prompted him

to push in the one direction rather than the other when he had to hold

his own against the tigers? In fact is it not thus to-day, when a man

has to meet danger, that the ideal which he has within him determines

_how_ he shall meet that danger, and others like it, and so ultimately

determines the whole attitude and carriage of his body?

On the whole then, judging from man himself (and it seems most cautious

and scientific to derive our main evidence from the being that we are

best acquainted with), it certainly seems to me that, though the

external conditions are a very important factor in Variation, the

central explanation of this phenomenon should be sought in an inner law

of Growth--a law of expansion more or less common to all animate nature.

Partly because, as said before, the unfolding of the creature from its

own needs and inward nature is an organic process, and likely to be

persistent, while its modification by external causes must be more or

less fortuitous and accidental and sometimes in one direction and

sometimes in another; partly also because the movement from within

outwards seems to be most like the law of creation in general. Under

this view the external conditions would be considered a

secondary--though important cause of modification; and regarded rather

as the influences that give form and detail to the great primal impulse

of growth from within; while the creature's own ingenuity and good luck

would occupy the ground between the two--as the means whereby the

external conditions in each individual case would be turned to account

to satisfy the inner needs, or the inner life would be accommodated to

the external conditions.

If we take the external view of Variation--which is the one most

favoured by modern science--modification or race-growth appears as an

unconscious or accretive process, similar to the formation of a coral

reef. There is no line of growth native in the race itself, but at any

moment it is supposed to have an equal tendency to vary in any

direction. Surrounding conditions act selectively; and by a process of

weeding out certain types survive; small successive modifications are

thus accumulated; and gradually and in the lapse of ages a more pliable

and differentiated creature, and more adaptable to a variety of

conditions, is produced--in whom however mind is incidental, and has

played but small part in the creature's evolution. This in the main is

the Darwinian-evolution theory.

If we take the internal view, growth is from the first eminently

conscious. Every change begins in the mental region--is felt first as a

desire gradually taking form into thought, passes down into the bodily

region, expresses itself in action (more or less dependent on

conditions), and finally solidifies itself in organisation and

structure. The process is not accretive, but exfoliatory--a continual

movement from within outwards. When the desire or mental condition,

which at first was painfully conscious, has overcome opposition and

established itself in altered bodily structure, it has done its work,

and becomes unconscious--the bodily function continuing for a long

period to act automatically, till finally it is thrown off to make room

for some later development. Thus race-growth or Variation is a process

by which change begins in the mental region, passes into the bodily

region where it becomes organised, and finally is thrown off like a

husk. This may be called the theory of Exfoliation.

To illustrate our meaning. Let us take the development of an eye. In the

amoeba there is a dim pervasive sensitiveness to light over the whole

body, but there is no eye, nothing that we should call vision. Still

this vague sensitiveness is of use to the amoeba. The shadow of its prey

falling upon the creature and exciting a sensation hardly yet

differentiated from touch helps to guide its movements. On this dim

sensation it relies to some extent; its attention is directed towards

it. Gradually, and in some descendant form, there comes to be a point on

the body on which this attention is most specially concentrated. The

faculty is localised; and from that moment a change is effected there, a

differentiation and a special structure; everything that favours

sensitiveness is encouraged at that place, everything that dulls it is

removed; and before long--there is a rudimentary eye. To-day we use our

perfected eyes, and are hardly conscious that we are doing so; but every

power of vision that we have was thus won for us by some lowlier

creature, step by step, with effort and with concentration. Or to take

an illustration from society. To-day society is ill at ease; a dim

feeling of discontent pervades all ranks and classes. A new sense of

justice, of fraternity, has descended among us, which is not satisfied

with mere chatter of demand and supply. For a long time this new

sentiment or desire remains vague and unformed, but at last it resolves

itself into shape; it takes intellectual form, books are written, plans

formed; then after a time definite new organisations, for the distinct

purpose of expressing these ideas, begin to exist in the body of the old

society; and before so very long the whole outer structure of society

will have been reorganised by them. After a few centuries the ideas for

whose realisation we now fight and struggle with an intense

consciousness will have become commonplace, accepted institutions, more

or less effete and ready to succumb before fresh mental births taking

place from within.

The modern evolution theory would maintain that among many amoebas and

descendant forms, one would at last by chance be born having the usual

sensitiveness localised in a particular spot, and, surviving by force of

this advantage, would transmit this "eye" to its posterity; or that in

the progress of society, new economic conditions having arisen, that

people would prosper best which most effectually and rapidly adapted

itself to them. But though there is doubtless truth in this view, yet it

seems, when all has been said, to be inadequate and even feeble; it

omits at least one half of the problem. If we look at ourselves, as

already pointed out, we see the two forces--the inner and the

outer--acting and re-acting on each other. May it not be so in animals?

Lamarck, poorly off, blind, derided, was a true poet. "Animals vary from

low and primitive types chiefly by dint of wishing"--and the world

laughed and still laughs. But it was his deep sympathy even with the

worms and insects (which he studied till he could discern them with his

mortal eyes no longer) that led Lamarck to see the human nature and the

human laws that moved within them; and as his outward sight grew dim

there arose before him the inward vision of the true relationship which

binds together all living creatures--which was indeed a vision of divine

things, and as different from the mere mechanism-theory of the survival

of the fittest as the sight of the starry heavens is different from a

governess's lesson on the use of the globes.

On the theory of Exfoliation, which was practically Lamarck's theory,

there is a force at work throughout creation, ever urging each type

onward into new and newer forms. This force appears first in

consciousness in the form of _desire_. Within each shape of life sleep

needs and wants without number, from the lowest and simplest to the

most complex and ideal. As each new desire or ideal is evolved, it

brings the creature into conflict with its surroundings, then gaining

its satisfaction externalises itself in the structure of the creature,

and leaves the way open for the birth of a new ideal. If then we would

find a key to the understanding of the expansion and growth of all

animate creation, such a key may exist in the nature of desire itself

and the comprehension of its real meaning. It is not certain that it can

be found here; but it may be.

What then is desire in Man? Here we come back again, as suggested at the

outset, to Man himself. Though we see pretty clearly that desire is at

work in the animals, and that it is the same in kind as exists in man,

still, among the animals it is but dim and inchoate, while in man it is

developed and luminous; in ourselves, too, we know it immediately, while

in the animals only by inference. For both reasons, therefore, if we

want to know the nature of desire--even to know its nature among

animals--we should study it in Man. What then is this desire in Man,

which seems to be the instigation and origin of all his growth and

development? At first it seems a hydra-headed senseless thing without

rhyme or reason; but the more one regards it the more clearly one sees

that even in its lowest forms it is steadily building up and liberating

all the functions of the human being. In its most perfect form--as in

what we call Love--it is the sum and solution of human activities, that

in which they converge, for which they all exist, and without which

they would be considered useless. The more you look into this matter,

the plainer it becomes. The lesser desires--the self-preservation

desires--hunger, thirst, the desire of power--exist, but when they are

satisfied they empty themselves into this one; they find their

interpretation in it. The other desires are nothing by themselves--the

most absorbing, avarice, ambition, desire of knowledge, taken alone,

stultify themselves--but love perpetuates itself; it is a flame which

uses all the rest as its fuel. And this Love, which is the culmination

of desire, does it not appear to us as a worship of and desire for the

human form? In our bodies a desire for the bodily human form; in our

interior selves a perception and worship of an ideal human form, the

revelation of a Splendour dwelling in others, which--clouded and dimmed

as it inevitably may come to be--remains after all one of the most real,

perhaps the most real, of the facts of existence? Desire, therefore--as

it exists in man, look at it how you will--as it unfolds and its

ultimate aim becomes clearer and clearer to itself, is seen to be the

desire and longing for the deliverance and expression of the real human

Being. May it not, must it not, be the same thing in animals and all

through creation? Beginning in the most elementary and dim shapes, does

it not grow through all the stages of organic life clearer and more and

more powerful, till at last it attains to self-consciousness in humanity

and becomes avowedly the leading factor in our development?

The desire which runs through creation is one desire. Rudimentary at

first and hardly conscious of itself, throwing out a tentacle here, a

foot there, developing an eye, a claw, a nostril, a wing, it seeks in

innumerable shapes and with ever partial success to realise the image it

has dimly conceived. The animal kingdom is the gymnasium, the school,

the antechamber, of humanity; to walk through a zoological garden is to

see the inchoate types of man, perched on branches, or browsing grass,

or boring holes in the ground; it is to witness a grand rehearsal of

some stupendous part, whose character we do not even yet fully see or

understand. From such half-conscious beginnings the desire grows, its

aim becomes clearer, till in the higher animals--the horse, the dog, the

elephant, the bird, and many others--it becomes a marked and

unmistakable force drawing them close to man, uniting them to him in a

kind of acknowledged kinship, and as obviously at work modifying their

structure as can be. Finally in man himself it becomes an absorbing

power; love becomes a conscious worship of the divine form; generation

itself is the means whereby, in time, the supreme object of desire is

realised. When at last the perfect Man appears, the key to all nature is

found, every creature falls into its place and finds its Interpreter,

and the purpose of creation is at last made manifest.

The Theory of Exfoliation then differs from that very specialised form

of Evolution which has been adopted by modern science, in this

particular among others: that it fixes the attention on that which

appears last in order of Time, as the most important in order of

causation, rather than on that which appears first; and recalls to us

the fact that often in any succession of phenomena, that which is first

in order of precedence and importance is the last to be externalised.

Thus in the growth of a plant we find leaf after leaf appearing, petal

within petal--a continual exfoliation of husks, sepals, petals, stamens

and what-not; but the object of all this movement, and that which in a

sense sets it all in motion, namely the seed, is the very last thing of

all to be manifested. Or when a volcano breaks out--first of all we have

a cracking and upheaval of superficial layers of ground, then of layers

below these, then the outflow of lava, and _last of all_ the uprush of

the inner fires and forces which set it all agoing. What appears first

in time, or in the outer world is--in the case of the building of a

house, the making of bricks; in the case of the flower, the outermost

bracts; in the case of a volcano, the stirring of the surface of the

ground; and in the case of Life on the Earth, the appearance of

protoplasms and primordial cells. The bricks are not the cause of the

house (if indeed the word "cause" should be used here at all) but rather

the house--or the conception of the house--is the cause of the bricks;

and the cells are not the origin of Man, but Man is the original of the

cells. The rationale of sea-anemones and mud-fish and flying foxes and

elephants has to be looked for in man: he alone underlies them. And man

is not a vertebrate because his ancestors were vertebrate; but the

animals are vertebrate, because or in so far as they are forerunners and

offshoots of Man.

It has been frequently said that great material changes are succeeded by

intellectual and finally by moral revolutions--as the conquests of

Alexander passed on into the literary expansion of the Alexandrian

schools and thence into the establishment of Christianity, or as the

mechanical developments of our own time have been followed by immense

literary and scientific activities, and are obviously passing over now

into a great social regeneration; but a reconsideration of the matter

might, I take it, lead us not so much to look on the later changes as

_caused_ by the earlier, as to look on the earlier as the indications

and first outward and visible signs of the coming of the later. When a

man feels in himself the upheaval of a new moral fact, he sees plainly

enough that that fact cannot come into the actual world all at once--not

without first a destruction of the existing order of society--such a

destruction as makes him feel satanic; then an intellectual revolution;

and lastly only, a new order embodying the new impulse. When this new

impulse has thoroughly materialised itself, then after a time will come

another inward birth, and similar changes will be passed through again.

So it might be said that the work of each age is not to build _on_ the

past, but to rise _out_ of the past and throw it off; only of course in

such matters where all forms of thought are inadequate it is hard to say

that one way of looking at the subject is truer than another. As before,

we should endeavour to look at the thing from different sides.

We are obliged to use images to think by--_e.g._ the opening of a flower

or the accretive growth of a coral reef--and possibly it would save a

good deal of trouble if we did not disguise by long words the truth that

all our theories in science and philosophy are simply metaphors of this

kind--but the _fact_ still lies behind and below them.

Perhaps, if we are to use the word Cause at all, we should do well to

use it in the old sense in which the _final_ cause and the _efficient_

cause are one (the _eidos_ of Aristotle)--to use it not so much to link

phenomena or externals to _each other_ as to link each phenomenon in a

group to the thought or feeling which underlies that group. The notes in

the Dead March in Saul, for instance. We cannot say that one note is the

cause of another, but we might say that each note stands in a causal

subordination to the feeling which inspired the piece--which is the

_origin_ of the piece and the _result_ of its performance--the alpha and

omega of it. Similarly, the ground floor in a house is not the cause of

the first floor, nor the first floor of the second floor, nor that of

the roof; but these actualities and the whole house itself stand in

strict relationship to a mental something which is not in the same

plane with them at all, nor an actuality in the same sense.

According to this view the notion that one configuration of atoms or

bodies determines the next configuration turns out to be illusive. Both

configurations are determined by a third something which does not belong

to quite the same order of existence as the said atoms or bodies. Chance

"laws" of succession may doubtless be found among physical events, and

are valuable for practical purposes, but at any moment--owing to their

superficiality--they may fail. Thus, an insect observing the expansion

of the petals of a chrysanthemum might frame a law of their order of

succession in size and colour, which would be valid for a time, but

would fail entirely when the stamens appeared. Or, to take another

illustration, physical science acts like a man trying to find direct

causal relations between the various leaves of a tree, without first

finding the relations of these to the branches and trunk--and so solving

the problem indirectly. It deals only with the _surface_ of the world of

Man.

In thinking about such matters, Music, as Schopenhauer shows, is

wonderfully illustrative, because in creating music man recognises that

he is creating a world of his own--apart from and not to be confused

with that other world of Nature (in which he does not recognise any of

his handiwork). Supposing a non-musical person were to examine and

analyse the score of a Beethoven symphony, he would be in the same

position as a man examining and analysing Nature by purely scientific

or intellectual methods. He would discover the recurrence of certain

groups among the notes, he would establish laws of their sequences,

would make all kinds of curious generalisations about them, and point

out some remarkable exceptions, would even very likely be able to

predict a bar or two over the page; his treatise would be very learned,

and from a certain point of view interesting also, but how far would he

be from any real understanding of his subject? Let him change his

method: let him train his ear, let him hear the symphony performed, over

and over, till he understands its meaning and knows it by heart; and

then he will know at any rate something of why each note is there, he

will see its fitness and feel in himself the "law" of its occurrence,

and possibly in some new case will be able to predict several bars over

the page! The symphony is not understood by examination and comparison

of the notes alone, but by _experience_ of their relation to deepest

feelings; and Nature is not explained by laws, but by its becoming--or

rather being felt to be--the body of Man; marvellous interpreter and

symbol of his inward being.

There is a kind of knowledge or consciousness in us--as of our bodily

parts, or affections, or deep-seated mental beliefs--which forms the

base of our more obvious and self-conscious thought. This systemic

knowledge grows even while the brain sleeps. It is not by any means

absolute or infallible, but it affords, at any moment in man's history,

the axiomatic ground on which his thought-structures, scientific and

other, are built. Thus the axioms of Euclid are part of our present

systemic knowledge, and afford the ground of all our geometry

structures. But as the systemic consciousness grows, the ground shifts

and the structures reared upon it fall. All our modern science, for

instance, is founded on the acceptation of mechanical cause and effect

as a basic fact of consciousness; but when that base gives way the

entire structure will cave in, and a new edifice will have to be reared.

Similarly, when the human form becomes distinctly visible to us in the

animals--as an unavoidable part of our consciousness--this consciousness

will form a new base or axiom for all our thought on the subject, and

the theory of evolution, as hitherto conceived by science, will be

entirely transformed.

Thus, although the experimental investigatory coral-reef accretion

method of modern science is very valuable within its range, it must not

be forgotten that the human mind does not progress more than temporarily

by this method--that its progression is a matter of growth from within,

and involves a continual _breaking away of the bases_ of all

thought-structures; so that, while this latter--_i.e._, the progression

of the systemic consciousness of man--is necessary and continuous, the

rise and fall of his thought-systems is accidental, so to speak, and

discontinuous.

It is then finally in Man--in our own deepest and most vital

experience--that we have to look for the key and explanation of the

changes that we see going on around us in external Nature, as we call

it; and our understanding of the latter, and of History, must ever

depend from point to point on the exfoliation of new facts in the

individual consciousness. Round the ultimate disclosure of the essential

Man all creation (hitherto groaning and travailing towards that perfect

birth) ranges itself, as it were, like some vast flower, in concentric

cycles; rank beyond rank; first all social life and history, then the

animal kingdom, then the vegetable and mineral worlds. And if the outer

circles have been the first in fact to show themselves, it is by this

last disclosure that light is ultimately thrown on the whole plan; and,

as in the myth of the Eden-garden, with the appearance of the perfected

human form that the work of creation definitely completes itself.