PROFESSOR TYXDALL'S ADDRESS. 683 



and all we feel within us — the phenomena of physical Nature as well 

 as those of the human mind — have their unsearchable roots in a cos- 

 mical life, if I dare apply the term, an infinitesimal span of which 

 only is offered to the investigation of man. And even this span is 

 only knowable in part. We can trace the development of a nervous 

 system, and correlate with it the parallel phenomena of sensation and 

 thought. We see with undoubting certainty that they go hand in 

 hand. But we try to soar in a vacuum the moment we seek to com- 

 prehend the connection between them. An Archimedean fulcrum is 

 here required which the human mind cannot command ; and the effort 

 to solve the problem, to borrow an illustration from an illustrious 

 friend of mine, is like the effort of a man trying to lift himself by his 

 own waistband. All that has been here said is to be taken in con- 

 nection with this fundamental truth. When "nascent senses" are 

 spoken of, when " the differentiation of a tissue at first vaguely sensi- 

 tive all over " is spoken of, and when these processes are associated 

 with " the modification of an organism by its environment," the same 

 parallelism, without contact, or even approach to contact, is implied. 

 There is no fusion possible between the two classes of facts — no motor 

 energy in the intellect of man to carry it without logical rupture from 

 the one to the other. 



Further, the doctrine of evolution derives man, in his totality, from 

 the interaction of organism and environment through countless ages 

 past. The human understanding, for example — the faculty which Mr. 

 Spencer has turned so skillfully round upon its own antecedents — is 

 itself a result of the play between organism and environment through 

 cosmic ranges of time. Never surely did prescription plead so irre- 

 sistible a claim. But then it comes to pass that, over and above his 

 understanding, there are many other things appertaining to man 

 whose prescriptive rights are quite as strong as that of the under- 

 standing itself. It is a result, for example, of the play of organism 

 and environment that sugar is sweet and that aloes are bitter, that 

 the smell of henbane differs from the perfume of a rose. Such facts 

 of consciousness (for which, by-the-way, no adequate reason has ever 

 yet been rendered) are quite as old as the understanding itself, and 

 many other things can boast an equally ancient origin. Mr. Spencer 

 at one place refers to that most powerful of passions — the amatory 

 passion — as one which, when it first occurs, is antecedent to all rela- 

 tive experience whatever, and we may pass its claim as being at least 

 as ancient and as valid as that of the understanding itself. Then there 

 are such things woven into the texture of man as the feeling of awe, 

 reverence, wonder — and not alone the sexual love just referred to, but 

 the love of the beautiful, physical and moral, in Nature, poetry, and 

 art. There is also that deep-set feeling which, since the earliest dawn 

 of history, and probably for ages j^rior to all history, incorporated it- 

 self in the religions of the world. You who have escaped from these 



