580 MENTAL SCIENCE 



itself; as something with which the deathless germ-plasm is more 

 instinct than are the somatic organs it evolves, even the brain where 

 it has now taken refuge; as something no less closely related than 

 theology once made the persons of the Trinity to be among them- 

 selves, with the nisus formitivus, whatever that is, which, when the 

 world was young and lusty, evolved all the products of natural selec- 

 tion, developed and then differentiated hunger and love, adapted 

 flowers and insects to each other, made instinct and inspired all its 

 purposive acts without the aid of any sense of purpose, was shaped 

 by all the forces that have modified life since it began; that domesti- 

 cated useful and tried to exterminate noxious animals and plants, 

 invented thousands of languages, the syntax of some of the lowest 

 of which are the new marvels of philologists; that laid down the 

 lines of the primeval religions and struck out all the unwritten laws 

 and customs of social animals and tribal men, the latter more com- 

 plex and perfect in many respects, as a recent English Blue Book 

 on Africa insists, than any that civilized legislators have yet devised. 

 On this view soul-life, when it was chiefly passion, feeling, impulse, 

 may have been far more dominant over the body and all its processes 

 than now. It was hot, intense, lived out close to the elements, always 

 in sight of the edge of the fierce struggle for survival. It was more 

 life than thought, more collective and racial than individual, shaped 

 the world from within rather than, as science is now learning to do, 

 perhaps, in a derived and secondary way, from without. Everything 

 was genetic, nothing logical, while as yet no symptom of the great 

 paralyzer, self-consciousness, had appeared. This was the great 

 reality which our late developed and senescent, ingrowing intellect 

 has lost and yearns for as old age yearns for its vanished youth. Its 

 traces, fossils, remnants, still abound in our own body and soul and 

 in life about us, but unless we can read our titles clear to this pleroma 

 of life abounding, the psychologist will still have reason to grieve 

 as an exile from his pristine paradise vainly seeking atonement with 

 God, the world, and self. Some type of soul-life has passed out of the 

 world with every species that became extinct, every vanished tribe, 

 with every child that develops into maturity, with every substitu- 

 tion of self-consciousness and reflection for the na'ive, intuitive, 

 spontaneous, and what we call the progress of knowledge is a com- 

 pound of mingled gains which we keenly feel with losses that we far 

 less keenly realize. 



When the intellect, which seems to have been developed late, as 

 a new function of adaptation to the external world, leaves the latter 

 and seeks to introspect its own processes and reflect upon them, it 

 crosses some important pons. This involution is hard, slow, and with 

 many stages. Perhaps first are the half-instinctive musings on some 

 memory-content of conduct as affecting pleasure and pain, or upon 



