208 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



the human intellect to carry it, without logical rupture, 

 from the one to the other. 



9 



The doctrine of Evolution derives man, in his totality, 

 from the interaction of organism and environment through 

 countless ages past. The Human Understanding, for ex- 

 ample that faculty which Mr. Spencer has turned so skil- 

 fully round upon its own antecedents is itself a result of 

 the play between organism and environment through cos- 

 mic ranges of time. Never, surely, did prescription plead 

 so irresistible a claim. But then it comes to pass that, 

 over and above his understanding, there are many other 

 things appertaining to man, whose prescriptive rights are 

 quite as strong as those of the understanding itself. It is 

 a result, for example, of the play of organism and environ- 

 ment that sugar is sweet, and that aloes are bitter; that 

 the smell of henbane differs from the perfume of a rose. 

 Such facts of consciousness (for which, by the way, no 

 adequate reason has ever been rendered) are quite as old 

 as the understanding; and many other things can boast 

 an equally ancient origin. Mr. Spencer at one place refers 

 to that most powerful of passions the amatory passion 

 as one which, when it first occurs, is antecedent to all 

 relative experience whatever; and we may press its claim 

 as being at least as ancient, and as valid, as that of the 

 understanding itself. Then there are such things woven 

 into the texture of man as the feeling of Awe, Eeverence, 

 Wonder and not alone the sexual love just referred to, 

 but the love of the beautiful, physical, and moral, in Nat- 

 ure, Poetry, and Art. There is also that deep-set feeling, 

 which, since the earliest dawn of history, and probably 



