LECTURES ON BIOLOGY. 



CHAPTER I. 

 FKOM THALES TO LAMAECK. 



Two characteristics are ineradicably fixed in the human 

 mind : the desire for action, and the thirst for knowledge. We 

 see their origin in the infant when in the first awakening of 

 consciousness it longingly puts forth its tiny hands. The play 

 of the child is but the consciousness of its desire to be busy. 

 Play to the child means living. In play it forgets itself and 

 its bodily wants : a day of enforced idleness will harm it more 

 than a day without food. 



When, later, the growing child breaks up its playthings, we 

 observe in that action the awakening of the desire for know- 

 ledge. It is no longer content with the bare fact that its doll 

 squeaks when it is squeezed ; it wants to know how the doll 

 looks inside, why it squeaks. Destructiveness and inquisitive- 

 ness are to the child as yet identical. In the act of destruction 

 reveals itself the desire to analyse, to dissect a phenomenon 

 into its elements, to fathom the cause of things. 



As in the early life of the individual, so we perceive in the 

 history of the nations and of mankind the need to trace each 

 phenomenon to a cause in other words, we observe the con- 

 scious pursuit of knowledge. It is true that, as with the 

 child, so with primitive man, the impulse is as yet not clearly 

 perceived ; but it exists, nevertheless, no matter how far we 

 may go back in the history of primitive man. Like the child 

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