Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



Man himself ; but indeed it starts with Man. 

 It plants itself on sensations low down (mass, 

 motion, etc.), and endeavours by means of them 

 to explain sensations high up, which reminds one 

 of nothing so much as that process vulgarly 

 described as " climbing up a ladder to comb 

 your hair." In truth Science has never left the 

 great world, or cosmos, of Man, nor ever really 

 found a locus standi without it ; but during the 

 last two or three centuries it has gone in this 

 direction^ outwards, continually. Leaving the 

 central basis and facts of humanity as too vast and 

 unmanageable, and also as apparently variable 

 from man to man and therefore affording no 

 certain consent to work upon, it has wandered 

 gradually outwards, seeking something of more 

 definite and universal application Discarding thus 

 one by one the interior phases of sensation — as 

 the sense of personal relationship, the sense of 

 justice, duty, fitness in things or what-not (as too 

 uncertain, or perhaps developed to an unequal 

 degree in different persons, embryonic in one and 

 matured in another), drifting past the more special- 

 ised bodily senses, of colour, sound, taste, smell, 

 etc., as for similar reasons unavailable — Science 

 at last in the primitive consciousness of muscular 

 contraction and its abstraction " mass " or ** matter " 

 comes to a pause. Here in this last sense, common 

 probably to man and the lowest animals, it finds 

 its widest, most universal ground — its farthest 

 limit from the Centre. It has reached the outer- 

 most shell, as it were, of the great Man-cosmos. 



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