CH. i.] THE QUESTION RESTATED. 371 



phenomena, as Newton s discovery was an immense exten 

 sion of the correspondence in space. The one has enabled 

 us to adjust our mental sequences to phenomena as distant 

 as the Milky Way; the other carries back the adjustments 

 till they comprehend the birth of the Solar System. The 

 announcement of a verifiable Law of Evolution is but the 

 most recent phase of a process which has been going on 

 from the time when men first began to speculate about the 

 world of phenomena, the process of substituting what may 

 be called dynamical habits of thought for statical habits. 

 Clearly the formation of a theory of the universe, whether 

 as expressed in the crude mythologies of barbarians or in 

 the elaborate systems of modern philosophers, is the estab 

 lishment of a complex group of subjective relations that arc 

 either very imperfectly or much more completely adjusted 

 to objective relations. All men now existing, whether civil 

 ized or savage, with the exception of idiots and very young 

 children, possess some such theory, however vague and 

 shadowy it may be. Such general statements as rt^-; be 

 made by the most ignorant boor obviously &quot;*** y some dim 

 conception of the world and of his relations to it. Even 

 the beliefs that the moon is about the size of a cheese, or 

 that the devil has bewitched his cattle, are parts of a rudi 

 mentary kind of cosmic philosophy. Now among unedu 

 cated persons, alike in barbarous and in civilized countries, 

 the crude philosophies current universally imply that the 

 general arrangement of things is everywhere and in all ages 

 substantially the same as it is witnessed by them in their 

 immediate environment. Their theories are not adjusted to 

 remote facts in time and space which only a thorough educa 

 tion could have added to their experience. They take what 

 we may call a statical view of things. Hence they suppose 

 that God created the world a few thousand years ago in 

 nearly the same condition in which we now behold it; 

 traditional observances, such as the keeping of a Sabbath, 



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