356 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The external world is made up of objects in relations with each 

 other. Nothing exists by itself, or out of relation with other things. 

 The very attributes which constitute a thing are its relations. The 

 perceiving mind, on the other hand, is constituted to recognize rela- 

 tions. By these it identifies each thing. All objects are classed by 

 their relations of likeness and unlikeness, and all knowledge is organ- 

 ized on this basis. To investigate a thing is but to determine its rela- 

 tions. Knowledge, in short, is relative, and our thinking is all carried 

 on in terms of relation. The infinitely extended and the infinitely 

 minute contexture of relations which constitutes the order of nature 

 has for its counterpart a marvelous nervous mechanism constructed to 

 reproduce these relations. The outer world, by its forces, acts upon 

 the senses, producing myriads of sensations, diverse in quality and in- 

 tensity, which are conveyed to the great central organ of mind, the 

 brain. This consists of the simplest elements, cells and fibers, but there 

 are hundreds of millions of these, closely knit and bound together by 

 commissures, so as to produce a compactly unified organism, capable of 

 duplicating in thought the multitudinous relations of the surrounding 

 universe. Added to this, we have to view the brain as a creation of Na- 

 ture through processes which have been going forward incessantly and 

 continuously during vast periods of time. It has been slowly evolved by 

 long intercourse with the environing world. It used to be thought 

 that the mind begins with the new-born creature, and it was likened to 

 a sheet of white paper, upon which anything can be scribbled. But it is 

 now held that the central nervous organism at birth embodies a mass of 

 nascent activities, latent capacities, and instinctive impulses which have 

 been inherited from ancestral generations through the experience of the 

 race, and in which the correspondence between the relations of external 

 phenomena and the internal relations of the mind has been progress- 

 ively increasing in extent and complexity. If, now, we glance at the 

 early processes of the unfolding mind, we shall see that this matter of 

 relations and their classing is very deep in the mental constitution. 

 Mind is made up of three distinct elements, the power to feel, the 

 power to act, and the power to know, or emotion, will, and intellect. 

 Of these, feeling is primordial, and leads to action and to knowing. 

 At first there is only feeling ; but changes of feeling arise as soon 

 as external forces begin to act upon the susceptible infant organism. 

 These changes of feeling are the raw material which is to be wrought 

 into distinct consciousness. A change of feeling supplies two terms 

 and a relation, and the discrimination of these is the earliest act of 

 knowing. The baby cries when in pain, and sleeps sweetly when all 

 goes well with it. Thus at the very dawn of psychical life there are 

 established relations of likeness and unlikeness among feelings by 

 which they are organically classed as feelings of comfort and discom- 

 fort, pleasures and pains. Discrimination of relations is thus the very 

 germ of intelligence. Through its apparatus of sensibility, known as 



