292 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



romuscular response to the outer world of the present, 

 man has acquired a mental or spiritual power that 

 enables him indirectly to picture and interpret the past 

 by means of the present, and thus to explore those 

 regions of the outer world which lie outside and beyond 

 the physical sanctuary within which his body is con- 

 fined. This "retroactive cognition" lies largely in 

 memorizing, or in approximately repeating a part of 

 the nervous reactions produced by previous experience, 

 as though the events that first produced them were 

 themselves present, or repeated. This new power is 

 apparently resident in an over-nervous tension, released 

 and expended in the repetition of the older sequence 

 of nervous acts, without the presence of the original 

 outer stimuli, and without the other bodily acts that 

 normally accompany them. 



This supplementary nervous activity initiates a 

 new kind of vital action that may be largely indepen- 

 dent of the external world it tends to portray. With its 

 aid, it is possible for man to construct image chains 

 which tend to follow the same order as those produced 

 by experience, and which thus tend to correspond with 

 the actual order of external events. These retrospec- 

 tive images are tested, readjusted, and approved or dis- 

 approved by supplementary experience to form a 

 broader and more secure basis for prospective action. 



These mental pseudopodia, this halo of mental out- 

 reachings into the past and future, into history and 

 prophecy, enable man to project himself as it were into 

 the limitless expanse of universal time and universal 

 space in search of those more comprehensive truths, or 

 realities, which he calls natural laws. 



This constructive usage of the imagination, ever 



