THE FLOWER OR THE LEAF. 349 



all life develops from centers ; and in Nature there are no single 

 lines. 



5. Miss Youmans's final proposition, that progress must always be 

 made from the simple to the complex, is the one with which I do most 

 decidedly disagree. The expression itself is ambiguous : for it may 

 mean the transition from the easy to the difficult ; or it may mean the 

 study of elements as a preliminary to the study of the compounds into 

 which they enter. In the latter meaning, the proposition can not 

 surely be applied to the leaf and the flower. Morphologically speak- 

 ing, it is true that all the parts of the flower result from transforma- 

 tions of the leaf, but this fact is altogether too recondite for a child's 

 appreciation. In no other sense can the leaf be said to enter into the 

 flower as an element — to be a " simpler " part of it. Xo knowledge 

 to be gained of the flower, other than these facts of embryology, pre- 

 supposes or requires knowledge of the leaf. Study of the one can 

 only be said to prepare for the other by the degree of mental disci- 

 pline it affords. And the very question at issue is. What is the best 

 for mental discipline, the contemplation of objects with the fewer and 

 less obvious characters, or of objects at once more conspicuous, and 

 more abounding in interesting details ? I have already stated the 

 reasons which seem to me to justify the selection of the second 

 method. 



The first seems indorsed, and perhaps is intended to be so, by the 

 Comtist classification of the sciences, and by the rather arbitrary at- 

 tempt of its author to identify this with the actual order of their his- 

 toric evolution. As regards their subject-matter, it would certainly 

 be untrue to assert that this attracted the attention of mankind in the 

 order of its (philosophically considered) simplicity.* At what appear 

 to us to be the opening periods of Greek thought we find already co- 

 existing the germs of all the six fundamental sciences, if we may 

 assume that even chemistry was foreshadowed in the doctrines of the 

 Four Elements, Such coexistence was inevitable, for the moment that 

 the human mind was aroused enough to observe and theorize about 

 anything, its attention could not fail to be attracted in several differ- 

 ent directions simultaneously. It noticed the form and number of 

 objects, and founded the sciences of geometry and arithmetic. But it 

 was quite unaware that these sciences deal with simpler elements than 

 make up human organisms, and believed that physiology and medicine 



* " While he [Comtc] asserts that the rational order of the sciences, hke the order of 

 their historic development, 'is determined by the degree of simplicity, or, what comes to 

 the same thins, of creneiality of their phenomena,' it micrht, contrariwise, be asserted 

 that, commencing with the complex and the special, mankind have progressed step by step 

 to a knowledge of greater simplicity and wider generality." — Spencer, " The Genesis of 

 Science." 



Sir. Spencer goes on to quote a remark of Whewell's that "the reader has already 

 repeatedly seen in the course of this history complex and derivative principles [read 

 'objects'] presenting themselves to men's minds before simple and elementary ones." 



