i;2 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



consciousness to animals possessing a nervous system, 

 and traces its beginnings in the 'blurred, undeter- 

 mined feeling answering to a single pulsation or 

 shock ' (as for example, to go no lower down 

 the life -scale, in the medusa or jelly-fish), to its 

 highest form as self-consciousness, or knowing that 

 we know, in man. This dominant element in Mr. 

 Spencer's philosophy secures it a life and permanence 

 which, had it been restricted to explaining the 

 mechanics of the inorganic universe, it could never have 

 possessed. It has been observed how the Darwinian 

 theory aroused attention in all quarters because it 

 touched human interests on every side. And, although 

 less obvious to the multitude, the Synthetic Philosophy, 

 dealing with all cosmic processes as purely mechanical 

 problems, interprets * the phenomena of life (exclud- 

 ing the question of its origin), mind, and society, in 

 terms of matter and motion.' Anticipating the 

 levelling of epithets against such apparent material- 

 ising of mental phenomena involved in that method, 

 Spencer remarks on the dismay with which men, 

 who have not risen above the vulgar conception 

 which unites with matter the contemptuous epithets 

 1 gross ' and ( brute,' regard the proposal to reduce 

 the phenomena of Life, of Mind, and of Society, to a 

 level which they think so degraded. 'Whoever re- 

 members that the forms of existence which the 

 uncultivated speak of with so much scorn, are 

 shown by the man of science to be the more 

 marvellous in their attributes the more they are 

 investigated, and are also proved to be in their 

 ultimate natures absolutely incomprehensible as 

 absolutely incomprehensible as sensation, or the 



