i26 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



FEELING IN THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 



Br Professor WM. E. RITTER 



MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION, LA JOLLA, CAL. 



HUMAN beings, in common with all others, are as fundamentally 

 esthetic and emotional as they are cognitive and rational. This 

 conclusion I believe to be warranted not only by the facts presented by 

 adult man in civilized society, but also by those observable in very 

 early, simple stages of life everywhere. We do not say that an amceba 

 knows the sensation it has when it comes in contact with a food-par- 

 ticle; nor that a babe knows the sensation that gives rise to the sucking 

 reflex when first its lips touch the nipple or a finger tip. Yet both 

 amoeba and babe convert, or elaborate, the raw fact of contact into a 

 set of activities that meets the needs of its existence. Each makes its 

 contacts serve its own larger ends as surely as does the adult man; and 

 no knowledge is worth anything if it does not do that. 



So we have to recognize that the esthetic, the merely responsive 

 aspect of our natures, and the psychically elaborative, the recognitive 

 aspect, send their roots down to the very deepest layer of organic con- 

 stitution; that the two come side by side from a common matrix of 

 organization. Neither can be proved to have arisen earlier than the 

 other, nor can either be shown to be derived from the other. This 

 fundamental parity between intellect and feeling has vast significance 

 for human welfare. Every philosophic system, every educational 

 theory, every religious interpretation of life, which fails to recognize it 

 is sure to be by so much inadequate. 



One phase of this inadequacy is subjectivism in its many forms. 

 Whether as idealism, vouched for in our day by Oxford and Harvard, 

 and dressed out in great learning and brilliant dialectic as the " Abso- 

 lute Good " ; or as occultism, vouched for by Mahatmas and the 

 " Mother Church, Scientist," and somewhat scorned by the more 

 scholarly, the same error runs throughout. The former ignore all of 

 man except that part of him which makes syllogisms ; the latter goes to 

 the opposite extreme and stifles the legitimate demands of the intelli- 

 gence for clear and rational thinking. Both fail to recognize that we 

 know-and-feel, all in one breath, whenever we respond in an un- 

 sophisticated, natural manner to contacts with men and things. 



One of the places in which the intellectualist form of subjectivism 

 has got in its stultifying work most disastrously, is in the education of 

 children. In spite of spasmodic efforts at reform, the factors of spon- 



