804 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



Nissl or neuratin substance. This lie inherits in common with 

 all animals from the rotiferan grade upward, and the energy 

 for the upbuilding of it — the cogitic — enables him to receive 

 and respond to directly, or to sort out, compound, and unite 

 into simple or complex resultant responses, the varied stimuli 

 absorbed by the cognitic system. This confers on him that 

 capacity which — humanly speaking — we may call the mental 

 and mento-moral. The entire material mechanism connected 

 with it is derived embryologically from the surface or sensory 

 layer — the ectoderm — ^but it becomes wholly shut off from the 

 surface as a part of the internal nervous system and very 

 largely as the brain. It functions therefore as an internal 

 correlating, compounding, and mentally elaborating substance, 

 that gives to super-man his high position over the other mam- 

 mals and even over the ruder savage. 



Finally, the phenomena, the experiences of human life in 

 the past ten millennia especially, powerfully suggest to the 

 writer that built up on, energized by, linked into complex 

 mental relations by, a combined bio-cognito-cogitic union is 

 a still more complex substance than the protoplasmatin, chro- 

 matin, or neuratin, probably resident in some part of the gray 

 frontal matter of the brain, and which hypothetically we may 

 call the spiritin. This, if we judge by phenomena observed in 

 hypnotism, in thought reading, in thought transfer, and in 

 possibly as yet unexplained spiritualistic actions and in high 

 ecstatic religious experiences, may be traversed by an energy 

 that we have called the spiritic, that man inherits probably 

 in feeble and provisionally imperfect beginnmgs from the 

 higher apes, but which has been in process of active evolution 

 during the recent millennia under such complicated and often 

 imperfectly understood conditions that many have rejected 

 some of the phenomena displayed as being impositions of 

 pseudoscience. But the possibility alone of thought-transfer 

 through wide distances of space is now accepted as a question 

 worth debating by some, and even as a demonstrated fact 

 by others; while hypnotic, religious, and other experiences are 

 not vagaries or delusions of the human mind, but scientific 



