Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



see a dog for the first time. It is a fox-hound. 

 Then I see a second fox-hound, and a third and a 

 fourth. Presently I form from these few instances 

 a general conception of " dog." But after a time 

 I see a grey-hound and a terrier and a mastiff, 

 and my old conception is destroyed. A new one 

 has to be formed, and then a new one and a new 

 one. Now I overlook the whole race of civilised 

 dogs and am satisfied with my wisdom ; but 

 presently I come upon some wild dogs, and study 

 the habits of the wolf and the fox. Geology turns 

 me up some links, and my conception of dog 

 melts away like a lump of ice into surrounding 

 water. My species exists no more. As long as 

 I knew a few of the facts I could talk very wise 

 about them; or if I limited myself arbitrarily, 

 as we will say, to a study only of animals in England 

 at the present day, I could classify them ; but 

 widen the bounds of my knowledge, the area 

 of observation, and all my work has to be done 

 over again. My species is not a valid fact of 

 Nature, but a fiction arising out of my own 

 ignorance or arbitrary isolation of the objects 

 observed. 



Or to take an instance from Astronomy. We 

 are accustomed to say that the path of the moon 

 is an ellipse. But this is a very loose statement. 

 On enquiry we find that, owing to perturbations said 

 to be produced by the sun, the path deviates con- 

 siderably from an ellipse. In fact in strict calcu- 

 lations it is taken as being a certain ellipse only 

 for an instant — the next instant it is supposed to 



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