It is an interesting and suggestive fact in Nature study that at the
outset man was thrown utterly upon himself for the very vocabulary of
the world-puzzle which presented itself to him for solution. He had
not only to unriddle his "inscription in an unknown tongue," but to
evolve even the possibility of an explanation out of his inner
consciousness. His first theories of the universe were based, not on
anything which the cosmos was, independently of him, but upon his own
nature and activities as a living animal. This resort to himself as
his chief means of interpretation resulted from the very nature of the
knowing process; for knowledge of things is never in any absolute
sense what things are, but is rather what they are like. When we
cognize an object we do it by referring that object to the class of
objects which in one or more respects it resembles. And as in this
process we draw from the objects most familiar to us the principle of
explanation which we need for the less familiar things that have not
yet become part of our mental possessions, much depends upon priority
in the setting up of mental classes, as well as on the strength of the
impression which they make upon the mind. The earliest and deepest
class impressions are necessarily those which arise out of man's
knowledge of himself--of his body and the parts thereof, of his
corporeal activities, and of his feelings and thoughts; next, of the
bodies of other men and of their movements; finally, in the order of
vividness, of the animate and inanimate objects most nearly related to
his life. It is these classes which, by virtue of their priority and
strength, naturally acquire dominating influence over all later
acquirements, and it is to them that the mind refers the impressions
gained from the more remote inorganic world.
Among the simpler illustrations of the effort man makes to assimilate
the external system to himself are those with which we are more or
less familiar in the domain of language. We find them first in the
forms for gender by which, in all inflectional tongues, inanimate
objects are to this extent likened to living animals. A similar
tendency is at work in the widespread lingual habit of naming things
after parts of the body, as in the case of "door," called the "eye of
the house" by the native of Banks' Island; of "son-tree," the term
applied by the Siamese to "fruit"; of the Malay's use of the noun
"child" for "lock"; of "house-belly," the African Mandingo's
equivalent for "in the house"; and of "hair," often used for "leaf" or
"feather" in many Melanesian languages.[A] In more modern forms of
speech the process is suggested by such expressions as the _head_ of a
bridge, the _eye_ of a needle, the _mouth_ of a river, the _neck_ of
an estuary, the _trunk_ and _arms_ of a tree, the _lungs_ of a
bellows, the _bones_ of an umbrella, the _nose_ of a promontory, the
_ears_ of a book, the _fingers_ of a clock, the _legs_ of a table, the
_veins_ of marble, the _foot_ of a mountain. Then there are analogies
based on the activities of the human body, for when we describe things
as standing, sitting, or lying; as rising, falling, running, or
climbing--when we use expressions like "striking clock," "dancing
light," "sleeping lake," "yawning precipice," "laughing skies,"
"babbling brooks," "raging billows," we are applying to the objects
named terms originally used to describe our own acts. The sense of
hearing, again, is utilized in such expressions as _taube Nuss_ ("with
nothing in the shell") and _taube Kohlen_ ("those which have burned
out"). So the defect of blindness is objectified in the _cæcum vallum_
of Roman speech, in _ciego_, said in Spanish of cheese that "has no
eyes," and in the _blinder Schuss_ of the Germans, whose more familiar
_Augenblick_ everybody recalls. Not less suggestive are the numerous
expressions which project conceptions of life and death into the
environment, such as the _caput mortuum_ (_tête morte_) of chemistry,
_eau vive_ (_Quellwasser_), "dead water" (turn of the tide), _todte
Farbe_ and _lebhafte Farbe_, _vivus lapis_ (firestone), "quicksand"
and "quicksilver," the "dead of night," "dead weight," a "dead level,"
and _todtes Kapital_. Nor must we forget that the reading of vitality
into inorganic objects, common enough among savages, has by no means
disappeared from civilized races. Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries have
shown that out of forty-eight children just attaining school age,
twenty believed the moon and stars to be alive, fifteen thought a doll
and sixteen thought flowers would suffer pain if burned. One pupil
described the crescent moon as "half stuck" or "half buttoned" into
the sky; the spluttering of coals in a fire was called "barking" by a
girl four years and a half old. Miss Ingelow says that when over two
years old, and for about a year after, she had the habit of
attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures, but even to
stones and manufactured articles.
This projection of words originally descriptive of the human body or
of its activities into the objective world of Nature finds its richest
illustrations in poetry,[B] where it may be held to represent less the
elaborate artifice of a cultured mind than one of the most primitive
tendencies of that mind powerfully swayed by emotion. Yet the process
belongs equally to the more prosaic efforts which man puts forth to
utilize the objects of his environment in the interests of
self-maintenance. One of the earliest of these is seen in the use of
words describing parts of the body to facilitate the description of
the external world in its numerical aspects. Thus the Chinese use for
"two" certain syllables (_ny_ and _ceul_) which originally mean
"ears," the Hottentots employing the word for "hand" in the same
sense. In middle high German the word for "sheaf" (_Schock_) signifies
sixty, and is applied in that sense to all kinds of objects. The
Letts, owing to their habit of throwing fish three at a time, employ
the word _mettens_, "a throw," in the sense of "three." Among the same
people flounders are tied in lots of thirty, whence has arisen the
practice of designating thirty by the word _kahlis_, meaning "cord."
The Quichuas attach the significance of ten to the word _chuncu_,
"heap." The Gallas word for "half" has been traced to the verb
_chaba_, "to break," and is the equivalent of our own word "fraction."
So in a large number of languages the term for hand signifies "five,"
"two hands" meaning ten, and "man" ("two hands and two feet") twenty.
A like origin must be claimed for the measures of space and weight
needed by man in his industrial and commercial activities. The finger,
the thumb, the hand, the palm, the forearm, the foot--the extended
arms, as in the ancient _orgya_, and the extended legs, as in the
modern yard--have all played a fundamental part in determining the
standard measures of the civilized world. To the same class belong the
[Greek: gyê], the extent of field that could be worked by a laborer in
one day; the _stade_, the distance which a good runner could traverse
without stopping to take rest; also measures of time, such as the old
division of the day based on the length of a man's shadow.
The human body was thus of primary importance as a means of
comprehending and coming into relations with the external world. But
men also sought to make the environment intelligible to them by
projecting into it the images gained from the more general aspects of
their life. Such phrases as "pig of iron," "monkey wrench," "battering
ram," "lifting crane," remind us of a period in which objects were
actually shaped so as to enable the mind to accommodate itself more
completely to the thought of their vitality. The Greek sailing vessel,
for example, was so constructed--with the body of a bird, with cheeks,
eyes, and projecting ears--as to make it seem to the navigators of
the time as almost alive. And the dolphins, eagles, ravens, and
dragons which threatened England from the prows of the invading Danish
fleet have had their prototypes in almost every nation that has
betaken itself to the sea.
Not less suggestive are the more general aspects of the process. Our
ancestor called the earth's satellite the "moon," or "measurer,"
because it served him as a divider of time. The familiar grains of
wheat and barley which he harvested became the units of his measures.
So the names of his seasons were based on the fall of the leaves, the
reappearance of particular stars, or the periodical inundations upon
which he depended for his food. The most primitive method in
chronology is that which enables man to orient himself in the world of
time by associating particular lunations with vicissitudes of weather,
with seasonal aspects of vegetation, and with the constantly changing
sights and sounds of the animal world. In the calendar of the
Crees,[C] for example, we find such designations as "duck-month,"
"frog-moon," "leaf-moon," "berries-ripe-month," "buffalo-rutting
moon," "leaves-entirely-changed," "leaves-in-the-trees,"
"fish-catching-moon," "moon-that-strikes-the-earth cold,"
"coldest-moon," "ice-thawing-moon," "eagles-seen-moon." So in the
calendars of Central America and Mexico,[D] the months are named
variously after the arrival of birds, the blossoming of flowers, the
blowing of winds, the return of mosquitoes, and the appearance of
fishes. The Greeks constantly used the movements of birds to mark the
seasons; the arrival of the swallow and kite were thus noted. Hesiod
tells us how the cry of the crane signaled the departure of winter,
while the setting of the Pleiades gave notice to the plowman when to
begin his work. The Incas[E] called Venus "the hairy," on account of
the brightness of her rays, just as the Peruvians named her the
"eight-hour torch," or "the twilight lamp," from the time of her
shining. One at least of the three portions into which the Greeks
divided their night received its name--[Greek: peri lychnôn
haphas]--from the social custom of lighting the lamps at dusk. For
whole races the departure of the sun made night a time of danger, and
man did his best to lessen the mystery of the heavens by filling their
obscure depths with the figures of animals and heroes, or by likening
their shining lines of cosmic cloud to a road or highway for the march
of beings celestial and terrestrial. Thus, for the speakers of
Sanskrit the Milky Way was "The Path of the Gods"; the Lithuanians
dubbed it "The Bird Road"; in Low German it is known as "The Way of
Cows"; the Cymris associated it with the course of the wind; for
Scandinavians it was "The Road of Winter"; the Persians viewed it as
the route along which the straw carrier drew his burden; to this day
the Winnebagoes call it "The Way of the Chiefs."[F]
Science itself is indebted to terms and phrases in which outer
realities are assimilated to the circumstances of the life lived by
man and by the societies which he forms. Such words as "attraction,"
"repulsion," "resistance," "nature," "body," "atom," "current,"
contain obviously anthropomorphic elements. The human origin of the
idea conveyed by the term "inertia" may be more or less veiled by
unfamiliar Latin elements, yet it is recovered for us again in
_Trägheit_, "idleness," the German form of the word. The phrase
"natural selection" contains a teleological element which has more
than once been used to throw discredit on the process which it
describes. And when one observes how persistently such an
anthropopathic expression as "affinity" is still applied to chemical
reaction, or with what _naïveté_ the term "law" is transferred from
the realm of human jurisprudence into the domain of natural processes,
one ceases to wonder at the constant confusions of outer with inner in
which so much of the psychomorphism of the time has had its origin.
It would be strange, then, if, seen in so many of man's efforts to
interpret the inanimate things around him, this process of
self-projection should not also be valid for the larger relations of
his mental activity to the universe. It is but a step, in fact, from
the application of anthropomorphic words to the objects and processes
of Nature, to the employment regarding such processes of
anthropomorphic thought. As the child finds the satisfaction of its
fancy in the discovery of some strange face as suggested to him in the
decorations of the wall paper which surrounds his sick-bed, or in
tracing out from the contours of clothes hung up within range of his
vision the preposterous outline or figure of some human likeness or
caricature, so the savage, with a deeper purpose born of necessity,
traces out from the larger patterns of the moving world about him the
organic shapes, embodying will and personality, that are to serve him
as explanations of the external power which touches his existence for
good or for evil, and which, thus serving him, enable him to come into
relations with that power. It is the deepest interests of human life
which make this process necessary, and it is of the very nature of the
process that the characters thus projected into the environment must
always--throughout the history of human ascent, and at every
particular stage of it--be closely and definitely correlated with the
degree and kind of the self-knowledge which is its source.
The earliest of the animal characters displaying this correlation,
and used as a means of understanding the environment, could not well
have been other than that of motion. That by the higher mammals, at
any rate, moving things, even when inorganic, are generally regarded
as alive, is a view rendered probable by a large body of evidence.[G]
But when man finally appeared on the scene, a new element came in to
complicate the merely animal attitude in which vitality was attributed
to inanimate objects in motion. By contemplating the phenomena of his
subjective life, and observing analogous phenomena in his
fellow-beings--through the consideration of dreams, swoons, even death
itself--our ancestor discovered in himself a character deeper than
that of vitality; came to recognize that the living creature, animal
and human, possesses an inner principle or essence underlying its
activities; is not only "alive," but also "animated." At first the
conception of vitality was one with the conception of bodily activity;
at last man learned to differentiate the movements of the body from an
inner essence to which he believed them to be due--learned, in a word,
to distinguish between the corporeal existence and the soul. And
having effected this first rude division of the characters of soul
from the merely physical attributes of life, our ancestor soon
projected the new view which he had reached of himself into the
objects of his environment. The beneficent influences of Nature, so
necessary to his life, he now invested with the good purposes of the
better nature within him; in the maleficent forces of the cosmos he
read the malignant will of his own angry passions.
But it is not as mere phenomena that these powers, thus finally
ensouled and regarded as personal, can be thought about. In the
beginning the human mind carries on its mental processes largely with
the aid of images--recovered images of something seen, heard, felt, or
tasted--and is yet far off from the stage of scientific thought in
which abstract concepts take the place of the recovered mental
pictures which have been yielded through the senses. Man thus needed
concrete images with which to think about the personal powers of the
external world, and he naturally found them in the animal and human
shapes already familiar to him. Discovering some likeness between a
Nature force and some animal, he henceforth associated the two, and
recalled the image of the animal as the more concrete means of mental
recovery when he wished to think of the abstract Nature power. Or,
associating some departed ancestor, relative, hero, or king with the
Nature force--an association which would be greatly strengthened by
belief in the survival of the soul after death--he gradually
confounded the disembodied human power with the soul of the Nature
power, and through the law of least effort, used the concrete image of
the departed human being to stand in his mental processes for the much
more difficult thought of the Nature force. But, whatever the process,
animal shapes were obviously needed to reduce the Nature powers to
such a degree of concreteness as would make it possible for primitive
man to deal with them as objects of thought. And it is not less
certain that while, for some races, the earliest shapes thus utilized
were those of the lower animals, the final form for all races was that
of man himself.
In the anthropomorphic stage, then, there is the same effort to
understand the external system by assimilating it to something with
which man is already familiar. The worshiped deities may be many or
few, numberless as the Nature forces, polytheistic as among the Greeks
and Romans, or one as in the monotheism of the Semite. Man likens them
to himself, attributes to them not only his outward shape, but also
his failings and virtues, making his Pantheon resemble not only the
social order, but also the political system under which he happens to
live. It is the completeness of this assimilation which made
anthropomorphism the most persistent aspect of man's intellectual
growth the world has known. Yet the view could linger only as the
possession of the intellectually slothful and immature. The
inadequacy, the crudeness, of the conception in which Deity was imaged
as a gigantic man gradually forced itself upon the attention of the
more thoughtful. Increased mental activity, a better acquaintance with
natural processes, brought the idea of a power above Nature rather
than merely superior to man; and as the human mind passed from the
conception of the superhuman to that of the supernatural--as,
moreover, the thought of merely local gods gave way to the idea of
gods not limited in their functions to particular areas--the
anthropomorphic shapes naturally fell away from the powers they could
no longer adequately represent.
Then other changes, strictly correlated with man's advancing knowledge
of himself, ushered in the latest stage of his attitude toward the
external system. For in the same mind which had been compelled to
reject crude anthropomorphism, there had been growing the
consciousness of man as something more than a mere compound of
vitality, consciousness, and will--something more than a set of bodily
and mental capacities essential to the work of self-maintenance--the
thought that man was the sum of his higher, not of his lower
qualities, that henceforth he must be measured by the activities which
he carried on in the domain of pure thought. And this recognition of
mental attributes as the most worthy, the most exalted characters of
human personality, could not fail to impress itself upon the
conception of deity already undergoing deanthropomorphization. More
and more, therefore, in the higher mind of the race, the Divine Being,
not only losing his former bodily form, but yielding even the grosser
attributes of personality with which he has been invested, becomes for
the thought of man a psychical being in the deepest sense of that
term. Anthropomorphism, or man-likening, passes away, and in its place
comes psychomorphism, or mind-likening.
Two aspects are thus recognizable in the mental interpretation of the
environment: on the one hand an aspect which may be called causal,
since it seeks the source of the power exerted by Nature forces and
objects; on the other, an aspect which is obviously formal, its main
significance being that it condenses, so to speak, groups of qualities
into a single mental sign. The causal aspect yields, in howsoever
simple or complex a form, a theory of the cosmos or of its parts; the
formal aspect is no more than a means, ready at hand, in the visible
bodies of animals and men for facilitating the use of that theory in
processes of thought. Hence we may regard vitalism, animism,
psychomorphism as so many stages of man's attitude toward the external
system, corresponding with the degree of his power to apprehend the
more abstract as distinguished from the more particular and
superficial characters of things that come within the range of his
knowledge. In the first, he explicitly recognizes vitality, the most
obvious character of Nature force; in the second, subsuming vitalism,
he raises the soul life to the place of honor; in the third, subsuming
both vitalism and animism, he emphasizes in psychomorphism the highest
human qualities which his mind enables him to recognize.
The passage from the idea of multiplicity to that of unity is itself
an inseparable part of the total process. As at the beginning man
reads vitality into the separate objects and forces of Nature, without
any thought of their underlying unity, so he regards as discrete,
unconnected, objectively unrelated, the multifarious souls with which,
in his thought, these various powers of the environment have come to
be animated. But in course of time, by an inner necessity of
intellectual growth, relations come to be perceived between the forces
of Nature, likenesses are recognized between the functions of spirits
and deities--between the powers put forth and the results achieved.
The result is a process of coalescence which, to describe it in the
briefest way, first merges a large number of spirit-evolved gods into
a smaller number of relatively independent divinities, forms these
into pantheons of gods each subordinated to a superior, and finally
unites all beings regarded as divine in the single, all-comprehending,
omniscient and omnipotent Deity of monotheism.
In all this advance, moreover, we find that the process illustrated
by the changing phases of man's mental attitude toward Nature also
holds good of the multifarious acts by which, in what is known as
religion, man has sought to realize that attitude in conduct. For, in
seeking to adjust himself to the system of Power, man has been forced
to conceive of his Pantheon in terms as well of his social
arrangements as of the political system under which he happened to be
living. The spirit world of a horde of savages could only reflect the
indefiniteness and disunion of the nomads whose imagination it
satisfied. But as the household made its appearance, as a definite
social structure arose, and the straggling tribes began to be united
into nations, the gods themselves took on the characters of an
analogous transformation. The divine selfishness--the "_remota ab
nostris rebus_"--long ago satirized by the poet Lucretius, obviously
correlated with the attitude of man toward man, just as naturally gave
way, with the growth of the social sympathies, to the thought of that
more active concern in human affairs which is one of the salient
characters of the later phases of monotheism. The original
indifference of Deity toward ethical issues--a widespread feature of
the earlier religious conceptions--could not but pass away with the
moral stagnation of the ancient communities out of which it had
arisen. So the comparatively new thought of a God definitely
identified in his aims and activities with the cause of moral reform
is no less obviously a result of the new attitude of man himself
toward problems of social improvement; while the persistence with
which, in human thought, morals remain associated with religion
sufficiently illustrates the extent to which man's view of each has
been determined by the self-knowledge which underlies his attitude
toward both. Note also, finally, the manifest relation in which our
human thought regarding mind and body has always stood toward
conceptions of a world-soul, and then the dependence of man's view of
the relation of God to the world upon the knowledge of his own planet
and of its place in the universe. For as long as our ancestor held the
old geocentric theory of the cosmos--regarded the heavens as a set of
spheres revolving around a flat earth--the thought of a deity outside
the world related to it as a mechanician might be to a cunningly
devised piece of clockwork which he had brought into existence, was
inevitable. But when the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth
century co-operated with the revelations of Galilei to secure the
final triumph of the Copernican over the Ptolemaic theory of the
world-order, the ancient view of Deity as external to his creation
gave place to the essentially modern conception of his immanence.
If now we attentively examine the progress above described, we shall
find that the earliest attitude of the human mind toward the external
system tends in the latest to repeat itself on a higher plane and
with a richer content. Thus vitalism, by the process of unification
and intensification, culminates in anthropomorphic monotheism, while
animism, through the coalescence of objects and forces at first
believed to be separately animated, finally develops into pantheism.
These two lines of thought, moreover, tend themselves to converge, or,
at any rate, to become interchangeable, since monotheism, by
deanthropomorphizing itself, approximates to pantheism, as is well
seen in the Christian theologies and ethical religions of the world;
while pantheism, by emphasizing the characters of intelligence and
will, is sometimes hardly to be distinguished from those modern forms
of monotheism which teach the doctrine of immanence. The intellectual
outcome of the whole movement, embodying the modern attitude in Nature
philosophy, is thus no longer anthropomorphism, but psychomorphism,
since it reads into the universe, not the characters which distinguish
human beings from the lower animals, but the highest manifestation of
the characters recognized to be common to both, namely, psychic
characters--the characters, in a word, of mind. For the deepest
reaches of human thought, the process of man-likening has thus given
way to the process of mind-likening. On the subjective side of mental
inquiry we get psychomorphic monotheism, or what may be called
theological pantheism; while on the objective side we reach scientific
pantheism, or monism. It is true that the psychomorphism of scientific
monism is reached by a process different from that which has
culminated in the mind-likening of theological pantheism. Yet in both
cases there is the same projection of intelligence into the external
system as a means of comprehending it. And as the intelligence of
atoms implies their vitality, we really return in scientific monism to
the vitalistic attitude of the primitive observer of Nature. The
salient difference between the two views is this: that while early man
subsumed under his concept of vitality only the rudest characters
thereof, the terms in the mind of the monist connotes in all their
richness the ideas associated with mind.
Enough has now been said to show the basis on which rests the whole
superstructure, of man's mental attitude toward the cosmos. Despite
all uncertainties regarding the details of the process, we may be
assured of its fundamental nature, and are thus compelled to recognize
the dependence of the forms of man's mental attitude toward the
universe upon his knowledge of himself. It is because his own actions
have their source in a personal will that he refers external movements
to will. He is conscious of his own acts, and the world around him can
not be devoid of a like illumination. Does he himself plan? Nature
must also be intelligent. And the highest qualities which he can
discover in himself he reads unhesitatingly into the cosmos.
At first sight, then, knowledge may seem inextricably involved in the
process here described. If man can not know the external system to
which he must adapt himself save by assimilating it to himself--save
by interpreting it on the basis of analogies which he discovers
between his own body and its activities, and the world with its
activities--are we not committed by our very nature as organisms to
all the errors which that nature imposes upon us? If, in other words,
every effort to view the universe as it is, independently of us, be
rendered impossible by the very nature of the knowing process, with
what chance of success shall we seek to eliminate those vitalistic and
psychomorphic characters which seem to belong to that process as its
very warp and woof? In reality our knowledge inflicts upon us no such
dilemma. Man is the helpless "measure of the universe" only to the
extent that his reasoning processes are undeveloped. That knowledge
must always have a subjective element is undoubted, but that man must
always mistake the subjective vesture with which things are clothed by
the senses for the things themselves is an inference which the whole
history of thought negatives. While his life remained simple,
primitive man could regard appearances as realities without
prejudicing the overplus of utility brought to him by his knowledge.
Yet as his relation to the natural surroundings grew in complexity,
the importance of the reasoning process, with its veto power over the
deliverances of the senses, began to assert itself. At first accepted
with little or no demur, these deliverances came more and more to be
challenged in the interest of self-maintenance; and finally, by
expansion of a germ possessed by the mind in the beginning, there was
developed that way of dealing with the testimony of appearances which
we call the objective method. The evidence previously accepted had
been, though on the whole useful, in large measure misleading. For in
appearances men saw and felt mainly what Nature was for them, and only
to a minor degree what the external world was for and in itself. The
great need of the investigator of Nature is to know what things are
independently of man, in order to know how they act on one another, as
a means of knowing how they will act on the human organism, and how
that organism may react on them in the interest of its own life. The
prejudice done by implicit reliance on sense testimony arose out of
the fact that it presented objects as largely unrelated to each
other--as so much being, rather than as so much doing, acting and
interacting, determining and interdetermining. It became the function
of reason to develop, out of the material furnished by the senses, a
knowledge of the true nature of the system external to man and
involving him in its scope which we call universe. In the carrying out
of this function the analogical process has remained, but the
analogies utilized, from being likenesses between what things seem to
be to the senses, have more and more become analogies between
propositions made regarding what things do, regarding how things act
upon, are related to and determine each other.
Our knowledge of Nature, therefore, illustrates progress from a stage
in which external objects are viewed as so much doing--from a stage in
which they seem more or less isolated, more or less independent of
each other--to a stage in which we know them as acting and
interacting, and therefore, by virtue of this action and interaction,
as interrelated and interdependent. It was because man had to begin
with the thought of the world around him as a series of unconnected
aspects that he fell into the error of regarding every object as
containing within itself the powers which it put forth; it was by
gradually progressing to the knowledge of the external system as a
process that he discovered how inextricably the smallest "flower in
the crannied wall" is linked to its vastest environment, and how
dependent must be the mechanism of the molecule, as well as of the
solar system, upon the whole universe Power which we call cosmos.
Thus also is it with man's method of interpreting the external world
system. At first unable to fully perceive his own relation to that
system, as part of his inability to perceive general cosmic relations,
and therefore viewing himself as more or less independent of
Nature--as something imposed upon it rather than as something arising
out of it--he naturally sought to force it for purposes of explanation
into the narrow limits of his knowledge of himself, of his feelings,
his thoughts, his institutions. But as he grew in the power to
comprehend his place in the system of things--to understand the way in
which the objects and forces of the world were related to each other,
together with the way in which he, as knowing organism, was related to
the universe--he gradually ceased from his vain striving to subject
the cosmos to himself, and at last learned not only to subordinate
himself to the cosmos, but to trace to it unreservedly the whole
method and meaning of his origin as a living, thinking organism. Man
in the beginning could be no more than the measure of the universe.
That he has come at last, wielding the objective method, to be its
measurer, is the culmination of a struggle between false and true ways
of interpreting Nature which has had the whole history of human
thought for its arena, and for its final triumph the establishment of
the objective or scientific method of investigation upon impregnable
foundations.